I don't get why Google doesn't want to ship them with Chrome, since they're not taking any more of a political stance by doing so than they are by shipping them with Android.
My idea is that an app should do its best to work with the OS and not override defaults, that includes system fonts. It is good for consistency, accessibility, etc... If Windows doesn't ship with flag emoji, or any character for that matter, that shouldn't be Chrome's problem.
Android is an OS, Google is responsible of it, so they get to decide what goes in their fonts.
By that argument, they shouldn't override the OS trust store either, but most browsers do. There's a compromise between consistency and user friendliness.
Sidenote, I'm the maintainer of the polyfill for this and its little script that extracts just the country flags from Mozilla's Twemoji font [0]. I'm not an expert by any stretch, but if it's in any way helpful that I chime into that Chromium bug then let me know. I'd love to deprecate the polyfill.
The entire offline installer of over 15 years worth of features is 120 MB for Windows, it's quite impressive really considering the amount of features that includes. If they took the typical approach of web pages run in Chrome that might be multiple GB by now.
Noto Color Emoji weighs more than 20 MB, which makes it difficult to embed to the browser. I think that's mainly due to the embedded PNGs so it would be technically possible to get rid of them and use vector fonts for special occasions, though. (In fact, I believe Firefox did so with its built-in Twemoji.)
Chrome runs a root program, and has for a few years.
>Standardizing the set of CAs trusted by Chrome across platforms through the transition to the Chrome Root Store, coupled with a consistent certificate verification experience through the use of the Chrome Certificate Verifier, will result in more consistent user and developer experiences.
