Thanks hippo, soonix and kcott for your replies! Much clearer now.

In summary, it seems you can't rely on a flag being displayed. Curiously, on my Android 11 (circa 2020) phone, and an older Android tablet I had lying around, the flags are displayed perfectly; on my more recent Windows 11 and Ubuntu 22.04.1 no flag is displayed, just a two character country code.

See Also

• The Emoji Subcommittee and the UTC will no longer accept proposals for flags (unicode.org)
• The Past and Future of Flag Emoji (blog.unicode.org)

👁️🍾👍🦟