We’ve run into confusing errors where are WordPress content was changing emojis into question marks. We tracked this down to an issue with MySql database versions and found that our site on WordPress Engine used MySql 5.7 which had collation for posts of utf8mb4_unicode_ci, whereas Local used MySql 8.0.16 with collation of utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci.
They seem to be the reason for the discrepancy pushing/pulling. Each time we push up to WPEngine we override emojis in our posts with “?”'s again.
I assumed that pulling straight from WPEngine would link my site and use the same database but even with the database set on WPEngine it sets the database to the later version. Maybe there’s a way to link to WPEngine that I’m not aware of?