I can confirm that the proposed fix works fine to fix the special characters (emoji) problem.
Simply open up tlc-transients.php (after making a backup copy of it!) and anywhere that you see a line like:
get_transients(…..);
change this to:
unserialize(base64_decode(get_transient(…..)));
and anywhere you see a line like:
set_transients(…..);
change this to:
set_transient(base64_encode(serialize(…..)));
Obviously, the next time you upgrade the component, this file is likely to be overwritten, so make a backup of your changed file too.
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