That isn’t what the grinning face with smiling eyes ever looked like on iOS. I have no clue where that article got that. And it’s not what it looked like on other platforms either. They have their emoji confused and so you can’t even trust the survey at that point. Here is the history of the emoji across platforms. https://emojipedia.org/grinning-face-with-smiling-eyes#designs. And I’d say that google’s emoji versions look bad compared to the iOS versions. Samsung’s are horrendous though.

And just for comparison here is the grimacing face history. https://emojipedia.org/grimacing-face#designs