> I also find tiny body-text-sized emojis hard to grok.
This depends a lot on emoji font. Apple's 3D-ish, highly colorful, rasterized emoji are very difficult to discern at small sizes, for example, unless you already know what they are.
More stylized emoji fonts, like EmojiOne or emoji that are drawn basically the same way as text glyphs, like in Symbola, are way, way easier to read, especially at small sizes.
If you're on an Apple device, though, you're close to fucked, since the operating system just ignores your font choices when it comes to emoji. The best you can do is carefully hack the actual files for the Apple Color Emoji font on macOS, which requires you to disable SIP and will cause lots of app crashes if you do it wrong. But if you're using an OS that has some respect for you and your choices, try a different emoji font!
This depends a lot on emoji font. Apple's 3D-ish, highly colorful, rasterized emoji are very difficult to discern at small sizes, for example, unless you already know what they are.
More stylized emoji fonts, like EmojiOne or emoji that are drawn basically the same way as text glyphs, like in Symbola, are way, way easier to read, especially at small sizes.
If you're on an Apple device, though, you're close to fucked, since the operating system just ignores your font choices when it comes to emoji. The best you can do is carefully hack the actual files for the Apple Color Emoji font on macOS, which requires you to disable SIP and will cause lots of app crashes if you do it wrong. But if you're using an OS that has some respect for you and your choices, try a different emoji font!