Essentially the Unicode consortium did not want to make an international uproar by acknowledging certain countries and not acknowledging others. So rather than there being flag emojis there are 26 characters (A through Z) and when you combine two you have a country. How to display these is up to the font. I believe the standard (or at least the de facto standard) is to use countries' 2 letter ISO abbreviations. This also means the Unicode standard does not need to be changed for the addition or removal of countries.
So it gets tricky. Why do they have so many coded when only one would do? Well, how would they render the other when someone puts it in? Or what if there is a different font being used on the selector that renders them differently?
Essentially the Unicode consortium did not want to make an international uproar by acknowledging certain countries and not acknowledging others. So rather than there being flag emojis there are 26 characters (A through Z) and when you combine two you have a country. How to display these is up to the font. I believe the standard (or at least the de facto standard) is to use countries' 2 letter ISO abbreviations. This also means the Unicode standard does not need to be changed for the addition or removal of countries.
So it gets tricky. Why do they have so many coded when only one would do? Well, how would they render the other when someone puts it in? Or what if there is a different font being used on the selector that renders them differently?