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Are there some well defined Unicode subsets, e.g. one without Emoji? (I'm only vaguely aware of XML specifying "Unicode without control characters" in the beginning).

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Yes. ASCII is one. Latin-1 is another.

Depending on what degenerate system you are in, U+00A9 © COPYRIGHT SIGN might render like a emoji, so ISO/IEC 8859-1 isn't safe.

Basic Multilingual Plane should be it.

While most emoji are outside the BMP, not all are. E.g., {U+2622, U+FE0F} (radiation symbol + variation selector) or even just U+2728 (sparkles). See https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Presentation_Style

Unicode Character 'HOURGLASS' ⌛ (U+231B) says hello.

Hello.

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