Emoji & symbols dialog stops popping up after a couple days usage: have to reboot

I have an issue that has been plaguing me since macOS ventura (now on sequoia), across two pieces of hardware: about every two days, the emoji & symbols dialog stops popping up when I press ctrl-cmd-space. Once the problem starts, the only way to fix it that I've found is to: reboot the mac. Ugh.

Things I've tried:

• Reboot mac (works)
• Use fn-e instead (doesn't work)
• Force Quit "Emoji & Symbols" from the Activity Monitor: the process does quit. The next time I press ctrl-cmd-space or fn-e a new process appears, BUT nothing pops up on screen. (doesn't work)

I've been a heavy user of this feature since it was called character palette in 10.2, then character viewer, now emoji and symbols, so I'm very sad. I would put :cat-tears: here: BUT I CANNOT INSERT EMOJI LOL.

Is this flaky for anyone else? I don't see a lot of discussion on the internet, surely the world would be rioting if you couldn't insert emoji after a couple days of using a Mac?!? It must be just me, but why? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here.

One slim possibility of what makes me different: I've been upgrading my user account since OS/X Jaguar (10.2), so maybe at some point a setting got set during 10 OS upgrade migrations that's non-default and is unexpected for the modern Emoji & Symbols dev, and causing it to hang? But mostly, I use pretty much default settings intentionally.