Emoji picker is too aggressive

Description

Let's say I'm reviewing code and want to seem less threatening with all my complaints. So, how about I suffix my complaints with a cute little :D emoticon. Sounds like a good plan, right? But alas, it's a huge struggle every time. There's no just escape from the emoji picker in any reasonable manner:

1. try just typing :D and moving on with your comment (pressing enter). Well, you just got a 🚪 instead.
2. try the same thing you do when mobile keyboard autocomplete messes up your text — delete the door: and add the D back. Well, of course, it's not gonna be that easy, you just get your 🚪 back.
3. try just pressing space after :D to pacify the picker — but when you press enter like this, your :D will turn into a 🚪 anyway
4. try going left until the picker disappears, then click at the end to continue typing — bam, there's a sneaky 🚪 again
5. try pressing escape and get 'Are you sure you want to cancel creating this comment'. Um, no, that's not what I was going for.
6. try pressing tab, at this point even that feels reasonable. Buuuut you guessed it, that also inserts a 🚪
7. okay, let's just type the rest of the comment first, and come back to this point once I'm ready to send it. So, once ready I go back, type :, type D, and press Cmd-Enter to send it before the emoji picker can mess it up. Miraculously however, the saved comment will have a 🚪 anyway.
8. flip table

…aaand this explains how we have 55 rows with 🚪 or 🎎 (a few versions ago, dolls was the first item in the emoji picker for :D) in our GitLab database comments table

Proposal

• The emoji picker is not so “agressive”, as it only appears after two characters, so typing : or :D doesn't show it
• Typing :D or :-D doesn't show the emoji picker but acts as a shortcut for 😄, which is rendered when submitting the message. This also applies to various other combinations, like :-) for 🙂
• The emoji picker disappears when pressing esc, when adding a space/new line, or when typing an inexistent emoji name/alias