Didn't know you were waiting for a reply, sorry. ^^ My opinion: your projects, your rules. I do think this is a docutils issue, hence the report. I know I can escape the asterisk, but if I have no control over the text I am parsing with docutils (i.e.: it is written by someone else), it means I have to manually scan the text for that special case and do the work of escaping. I think docutils could handle that, since it already has to parse the text. Feel free to close this if you feel it does not...
Cannot use asterisk emoji without a warning