That emoji is pretty versatile, from what I’ve seen it can resemble feeling melancholy, dead inside, exhausted, or a sarcastic “I’m fine”. But as with most emoji’s, it’s all about context clues to fully understand why it was chosen.

In gen z, I see it mostly used as an ironic “this is sad”. It’s like how 😭 is used as a laughing emoji.

example:

“this guy really thinks that was tuff (cool) 🥀”