:x: ![]()
<small>:x:</small> ![]()
<small> :x:</small> ![]()
Any other character, even a single space, will prevent the emoji from having the only-emoji class that makes it bigger.
I understand how it behaves like this and my guess is this is not very simple to fix, and it is also an edge case.
But I guess it’s always worth having a record of this minor “issue” somewhere, hence this topic.