Maybe you misunderstood me, or I'm misunderstanding you. I'm talking

/em slaps <t>
/em slaps <t>
/em slaps <t>

being the problem and people not knowing they can disable it to just do the motion itself.
There's no misunderstanding on my end. You're saying that people can turn off emotes in the chat to prevent spam; I'm saying not everyone wants to turn off these emotes in the chat and would still like to see emotes that aren't spam without just dropping a nuke on all emotes. Your post was a non-solution.

What would be at least a passable solution would be the act of blacklisting also stopping you from seeing/hearing a person's emotes, but obviously that one's up to SE to make happen. I already know that fairly recently I tried to blist someone who was spamming emotes and it had no effect.