That’s hilarious. I used to work for the studio that drew all of Apple’s emoji. I wasn’t on that job (thank the gods), but we made all the original assets at something close to that resolution. 2048x2048 I think.
Fun fact - from there it wasn’t just a matter of scaling them down. Each emoji had to be redrawn at each of five or six different resolutions, because line weights are super important.
We had to write our own software just to keep track of all the assets through the hundreds of rounds of review.
And yes, Apple is quite aware of what the eggplant and peach mean.
