Speaking as someone born in the summer of 1996 - the roaring ‘90s :’)
This isn’t restricted to the sordid new generation in the US - whether you’re in America or Canada, the UK, Australia, wherever, y’all have problems! Speak like normal people desu or he’ll get ya
long before emoji, most web forums had “smilies” (replacements of strings like “:)” and “:(” and “:P” with corresponding smiley images); emoji are in my mind that except standardized in Unicode and a way to save bandwidth
XD
That one was usually not autoreplaced, likely a reason why it was used specifically to get around that.