Kinda, in the sense that you can express stories or substitute words with emojis, however the usual purpose of emojis is a memetic one (“I’m smiling like this picture of a face” - which one can possibly relate to on a personal level). Also, about generally saying that hieroglyphs are lil pictures, while not untrue, on some level every script or writing system is just a set of pictures (representing various things).

More importantly, the agreed distinction in question here is the general difference between alphabets and logographies (the third biggest group being syllabaries).

And, there are also ideograms, which is how I think of emojis (bcs “emojis” with eg full words as a pic don’t seem all that emoji-like to me):

An emoji is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversation as well as to replace words as part of a logographic system. Emoji exist in various genres, including facial expressions, expressions, activity, food and drinks, celebrations, flags, objects, symbols, places, types of weather, animals and nature.

Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵, ‘picture’) + moji (文字, ‘character’); the resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental. The first emoji set was created by Japanese phone carrier SoftBank in 1997,[5] with emoji becoming increasingly popular worldwide in the 2010s after Unicode began encoding emoji into the Unicode Standard. They are now considered to be a large part of popular culture in the West and around the world. In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named the Face with Tears of Joy emoji (😂) the word of the year.