You can disable this feature.
I don’t get mad at Roblox for having built-in chat, or a built-in playerlist, or other CoreGuis-- why? Because you can disable them.
I’ve never seen the developer community respond in this way to new technologies that do no harm to games. This topic has nearly 170 replies, with over 270 replies ever made (if you count deleted posts), real problems that are impacting the developer community will never be addressed if we all spend our time ranting about emotes.
Emotes have been on Roblox for years, this is an expansion of that and there are many business reasons (especially in regards to internationalisation) that emotes are necessary, as a “universal language”.
Typing /emote wave in chat is really old and counter-intuitive, not to mention, it doesn’t translate to other languages- emote menus do.