Like many folks, I sometimes use emoji at the beginning of a title to add visual interest. If I choose to sort alpha by title, the algorithm appears to sort based on the relevant character codes, instead of starting with the text part of the title. I doubt that many people have a use case for sorting by emoji character code.
EDIT: I thought of a real use case for the current function. If you use leading emoji for priority, eg, one star, three stars, etc., alpha sort will put your most-starred items on top. I bet there are some folks using this. Not sure how to balance these conflicting use cases.
