I really hate that Unicode retroactively made some pre-existing smileys into colored-by-default emojis.
> I feel they give off a casual chat messaging vibe, since before colored emojis became part of Unicode proper they were exclusively used for chat messengers.
This is mostly cultural, though. Some people are used to this.
There's a Unicode sequence that tries to use a monochrome glyph instead if it's supported which I prefer as it's more in keeping with the rest of the text (though an issue with some of those variants is legibility at small sizes/PPI).