Well the cats out of the bad grave now...

A fairly straightforward fix for this complaint would be a toggle to turn off persistent e-motes client side.

This being a client side setting means that if you made use of this feature, only you would see dozens of people standing motionless in Limsa Lominsa.
If you left persistent emotes on, you would see the dance party.

Existing features like this: battle effect settings, shadow settings, movement physics settings. All such options affect client side rendering only.