It's not surprising to me that the two most negative reactions are making people angry and demanding an explanation for their usage. You may not demand that someone reply to you when you're downvoted, but enough people do that I think it proves my point that the dislike (and the negative reactions more broadly) is fundamentally different from the others. It's just silly to pretend that a post getting a lot of likes is no different than a post getting a lot of dislikes. Of course it's different. One is negative, one is bad, one makes the poster frustrated/angry/upset.
If you are not surprised by peoples reaction to the red emoji then why would you use them? If you claim that red emoji are negative, bad and make posters frustrated/angry/upset why would you use them?
You also did not address the fact that you, and others, incorrectly label the thumbs down emoji as "dislike" when it is in fact "disagree" and you also didn't address the obvious differences and reactions to those two.