This is why I don’t like when emoticons are automatically replaced with emoji or graphical emoticons. If I had wanted a standard face I’d’ve used one! It’s definitely a hack, but you can illustrate a lot of nuance with textual emoticons/kaomoji that you don’t get from standardised emoji. Unfortunately, emoticons also suffer because systems weren’t designed for them—for example, I use :P in a sans-serif typeface to express exasperation, irony, “oh come on”, that kind of thing, but in a serif typeface it looks like it’s smiling, which changes the tone completely—and sadly, this has become the standard way of rendering it as an emoji. If there were an easy way to embed small images in digital “plain text” we could do this kind of inline illustration with much more reliable conveyance of tone & intent.