That’s not the point. New emoji are part of a software update, and people are eagerly awaiting an update to resolve iOS bugs on their end. The headlined features include emojis and not the bugs fixed, which give off the (incorrect) impression that adding new emoji are more important.
Apple employs thousands of software engineers. If someone subscribes to the asinine belief that every one of them — hell, even more than several of them — is working at the Unicode/emoji sweatshop day in and day out, they're wrong, that's their problem, and they don't need excuses made for them. It's asinine and doesn't even deserve the time of day you and I are giving it.
The same goes for people expecting public release notes to be a comprehensive changeset at iOS's scale. iOS 17 was released this week, certainly with a host of bug fixes that didn't get a single mention in the release notes. That doesn't mean that they didn't happen or that significant engineering time wasn't spent on them relative to the new features. Every set of release notes ever will prioritize new features over bug fixes, especially ones dealing with some edge case configuration impacting maybe 0.5% of the user base. They're still important bug fixes impacting (literally) millions of people, but with the acknowledgment that 99.5% of users don't care because they never encountered the bug in the first place.