Presumably your usage is limited enough not to cover the entire unicode space, and even if you hit the current operator, it should be trivial to update all previous work with a new character, since its prior usage was unambiguous (literally character replacement).

Tbh if you're assuming unicode input (which pollen does), and assuming its easy to write the character (which it is, given that system hotkeys for unicode are available or can be made available on most/all target systems), then it seems to me absurd to use the normal ascii character + escape character operators for embedding functionality in text