Because this setting is in the emoji section of the keyboard. That AI stickers option is for stickers you’ve already made (including from your own pictures), or you can prompt for an AI generated one if you have drawing assist turned on. If you tap ai stickers there in that screenshot it brings you to the option to turn that off (but doesn’t get rid of the button in the emoji section of the keyboard).
If you want to get rid of that entire section, you can remove the button to get to the emojis.
Why can’t you turn off emojis?
I meant the AI stickers.
I think this is because they are part of the Unicode standard so they’re just standard characters. That’s pure speculation though.
Because this setting is in the emoji section of the keyboard. That AI stickers option is for stickers you’ve already made (including from your own pictures), or you can prompt for an AI generated one if you have drawing assist turned on. If you tap ai stickers there in that screenshot it brings you to the option to turn that off (but doesn’t get rid of the button in the emoji section of the keyboard).
If you want to get rid of that entire section, you can remove the button to get to the emojis.