They do enhance conversations and can help express emotions more prominently than "classic" punctuation marks or tone tags (the "/s" for example). But I don't think that more than 30 or max 40 is in actual use - rest of the seems to be just forgotten.

Frankly, whenever I read that subcommitte decided to introduce new extremely specific ideograms to the set, I wonder what's the point of that because as above: these probably will be forgotten or even not discovered.

But at the same time I wouldn't call them childish nonsense. We have been using various emoticons sets or even text ones on the Internet long before emoji become popular. They're in fact still emoticons just with fancy name and some standardization, interoperability.

I'd insert my favorite "melting face" here but it's not possible.