Precisely. Toki Pona is a language consisting only of 123 words. Therefore, it is necessarily ambiguous, and may tend to form huge clusters of (seemingly) unrelated sentences and translations that only become identical in Toki Pona. "Creative" translations from and into it have added to the chaos. The emoticons were used by those who used them to make more subtle distinctions. However, they are being removed. I think the relatively small Toki Pona community (according to Wikipedia there are "over 100 speakers") is working on making it more usable and establishing those distinctions phraseologically. Our Toki Pona contributors will know better.

As Toki Pona has no ISO code, it does not actually meet the criteria to be accepted as a language on Tatoeba, but there are certain exceptions that were introduced before such stricter rules were in place.

i mean that's what adjectives/adverbs are for, and judging by the edit history the person *did* in fact use those before going back and switching them to emojis
sometimes they're merely supplemental sure, like `poki 📦` - 📦-like box (though i'd argue they're not very necessary in that case)
but sometimes they're used as a cop-out to avoid actually translating a thing, such as `tenpo 🎄` - 🎄 time (i'd do either `tenpo pi kama Jesu` - time of coming of christ, or `tenpo Santa` - santa time if i'm feeling whimsical)

using japanese characters isn't a dialect but a script, the words are the same just written differently
as for what level of dialect should be allowed: iunno, but if they are then i think there should be a standard translation alongside each dialectal one