LGTM thanks! I'm also of the opinion that we don't really need to ship a emoji fallback webfont and the few people who run systems that don't install one by default and haven't already installed one should expect to just not see them which must already be true for almost every other site they visit.

Feels like an intentional decision for somebody not to have one of these fonts installed at this point and I can't imagine why they would prefer downloading a 9MB Web font instead of installing a real one system wide. I only agreed to it previously because I didn't want the emoji PR held back but think it is unnecessary for us to provide. Maybe for another PR though

Yeah I think I tend to agree to remove the emoji fallback but as it stands, it does not hurt us to have. Browsers should only attempt the download if they can't display a certain emoji. Then there's the issue that the font does not work in Firefox because of a bug there, so it's only targeting Chrome/Edge on some Linux distributions really.

would appreciate someone with Chinese locale testing it too however

I did not change anything about the locale-specific font overrides, so I guess those will be fine.

Looks good, would appreciate someone with Chinese locale testing it too however

I will test it after it deployed on try.gitea.io