Another weird quirk is that because emoji reactions are just emails (that Gmail sends to other clients and hides for itself), any emoji reactions you send can’t be taken back. There’s only Gmail’s “Undo send” feature for taking back reactions, which delays sending emails for about 30 seconds, so you can second-guess yourself. After that, you’re creating a permanent emoji reaction paper trail.
Thankfully, there are some limits on this. It won’t work on business or school accounts, so you can’t respond to your boss’s email with a poop emoji. Emoji reactions are only for casual emails that people apparently send to friends. (Do these people not have group chats?) Emoji reactions also aren’t available for group email lists, messages with more than 20 recipients, emails on which you’re BCC’d, encrypted emails, and emails where the sender has a custom reply-to address.
If the idea of emoji reactions to email has you selecting the puke emoji, as far as we can tell, there’s no way to just turn this off.