Oh, that's interesting. I didn't think of that. Usually, people want to use emoji sets to normalize the UI across devices but I can see the value in making the emoji feel native.
You could toggle emoji rendering on the server side with a switch in the template but that feels hackish.
By the way, if you find yourself regenerating the same JavaScript often you can set up a cache directory for the minifier. It hashes the input and saves the result of the minification for reuse. I run 643 JavaScript tests locally before every commit; if I had to run the minifier for each one it would take 30 minutes. π
$minifier->cacheDir = '/path/to/dir';
I think that's all the configuration related to minification. I'll try to write some docs about the JavaScript parser this week.