I’m not so sure about the extremely uncommon, those who do may be a minority, When I have reached a point where there isn’t much more interesting for me to do on an official server, then I often say goodbye to people, delete all thralls, pets, placeables, buildings and finally my character and never look back, the next time I decide to start on a new server, I actually enjoy having find stuff again, however don’t really know about the emotes recipes because I rarely search for them 
I think there are more like me out there who don’t get too attached to pixels, especially on pvp servers 
PS. I do have 1 EL and Siptah character that I never deleted, but then again I don’t play much with them, they are just there because they were made for completion of the content 