Comment by krackers

No, I think it really did allow it. You can see the source for those emoji enabler apps in [1]. I think that various AppKit APIs do end up writing to that file so r/w access to that file may have been required. And in those days sandboxing probably wasn't as tight.

[1] https://github.com/lilyball/emojienabler/blob/ac90ef6e1ac817...