Instead of removing certain fun emotes from the game, why not just create an emote filter? It would be simple as:
Player A /licks Player B. Player B has the emote filter on and can’t see that Player A /licked them because Player B isn’t notified.
The filter could filter out select emotes or just block them all. I used /lick as an example because it’s on the chopping block.
You can already turn off emotes I think. You can’t filter certain emotes, though. You either have them on or you don’t.
This could have all been avoided if people just turned off he emotes, rather than get offended and force changes.
Are you kidding me? Are you serious? What on earth?? You think too logical here… you can’t say such things. This would be too easy!
Easy answer, they don’t care about what players want to see they care about what they want to see 
I’ve been linking this
https://i.postimg.cc/Bn2jrzGP/image.png
as my reasoning but someone took the liberty of consolidating multiple dev posts 
https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/2606448-So-it-turns-out-the-devs-were-behind-these-changes-all-along
Oh man that thread is gold. I wholeheartedly support the OP there.
“If you support the devs of games, please be aware that we also have opinions on inclusions in our games”
We as players have opinions too but hey.
A filter would be a good way to approach this. It’s more individual customization too which is always a good thing. I don’t understand why this wasn’t tried first. You can still say whatever you want in /w and /s and you can make any emote you want manually, and you can macro it all anyway, so what’s the difference?
I don’t think these changes are being pushed by the players. By forcing these changes on the players, the devs can at least point to something they feel is tangible enough as evidence of a company-wide culture shift.
I have yet to see a single player upset about the fart emote.
I hated this response so much. It reads like gaslighting.