Everything can be reduced to text. Sure, I'm of course pushing it here with my "all digital information reduces to bits, and thus could be text", but the meaningful processing requires understanding the inherent structure and relationships within that data.

It's like arguing that "all books are just sequences of letters". That's technically true, but meaningless without understanding grammar, semantics, and context.

What I'm saying is akin to: "First step to understanding all the books starts with understanding letters..."

Anyway, emojis are of course text - even though they are stored as encodings. For example, LLMs process them exactly like any other text characters - they're tokenized, embedded, and handled through the same mechanisms as words. I should've use a different analogy to make my point clear, but you know what I meant.