Emojis in chat

Guess a bit of a self answer: https://modrinth.com/mod/emotes

Would really appreciate any other options in case this one doesn't work

ah that requires a client-side mod

Makes sense ig

The easiest way to accomplish this is with a custom resource pack that assigns the emojis to unused unicode characters, and then a mod/plugin/datapack to detect text strings in chat when the send message event is fired and replace the matched text with the unicode character.

So yes, doable entirely server side, but I don't know of any mods that do this, as most of my expertise is from the paper ecosystem.