Rebus puzzles

When you do the NYT rebus puzzle, how do you fill in the circled spaces with rebus picture?

You may or may not be familiar with the phenomenon of certain words getting censored on TikTok and Xitter so people worked their way around with substitutes like "grape" for rape or "unaliving" for suicide. And you also may or may not be familiar with how those substitutes have ended up on websites which don't have censorship rules like AO3/TumblReddit and it is bloody annoying on so many levels that I don't have time or space to get into an essay about.
At any rate, I'm starting to see these creep into GR reviews; I tend to check the reviews of dark books so I can see if there's a trigger too wild for me, and it's like navigating a Rebus puzzle. "m@fia", "tr!gger", "h0rr0r", "gr@phic", "murd€r", "mutil@tion & vi0lation", "r@p3", "teen@ge", "bad @$$", good god, I feel sorry for anybody with a screen reader trying to listen to all this garble.
tldr; is this a GAmazon thing or just the TikTokification of language spreading its tendrils out?

Hello!
My daughter (11) requested an at-home and escape room for her birthday party. She's invited several friends I've never met, so in the interest of not know the parents, I'm keeping everything very G-rated.
The premise of the puzzle is that I had to lock up the cake to keep her sister out of it before the party, and now I can't remember the lock code. I have memory problems, so I set up clues to help remember. But I need to "go buy ice cream" so can they figure it out while I'm gone? (Not actually leaving the house, obvs. Just supervising from another room.) The kids will be able to call me for help if needed.
I have a word search where the uncircled letters spell the 4 suits of a card deck. When they unlock the deck, there's one card of each missing and that's the final puzzle. There's a dance lock (borrowed from Curse of Strahd), some rebus puzzles that lead to a cipher, birthday hats with numbers that must be added, etc. etc.
I was going to also do the Harry Potter potions puzzle, but I tried to modify it a smidge. That puzzle has 2 helpful options (move forgot to and move back to safety), but mine can only have one helpful potion. The "good" potion is an orangey-yellow that will be poured on paper to reveal a secret message. No other color will work and I only have glass bottles, so I have dyed water, vinegar, and rubbing alcohol in the others for different smells.
My updated riddle did not go well during play testing. I will post a photo of it in the comments if I can figure out how. I can have up to 7 vials, any colors of the rainbow but need orange or yellow, all different sizes. I could add tags if needed.
Can someone help me come up with a puzzle that would get them to pick the right bottle??

Pretty common topic, but I want to list some of the most egregious examples of this.
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TAR 2 - Boat/Beast. Travel 1.5 miles on a raft or on the back of an elephant.
It's a no-brainer that paddling a raft down a river is going to be faster than traveling by elephant. Nobody chose the elephant task.
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TAR 6 - Swim/Paddle. Score one point against a professional water polo goalie or inflate a raft and paddle it across a river known for strong currents.
Even on paper, Swim sounds like it would be faster. Thing is, it was completely effortless since none of the goalies even tried; it literally took less than a minute and most of the teams expressed their surprise at it being so easy and fast. Inflating a raft and paddling across a public river was clearly more time-consuming and more difficult.
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TAR 7 - Pony Up/Tee It Up. Ride a horse into water, slide off its back, grab its tail, and then hope it swims around a buoy. The alternative is to play golf until you get one golf ball to land in the green.
Even on my blind viewing, I was thinking "Why the heck would anyone choose the horse task?" because it sounds very unsafe. It would require you to hold your breath and hope that a horse swims around a buoy and comes back to shore. I'm not an animal expert, but I feel like hanging on to a horse's tail while it's swimming through water would hurt the horse. The alternative is just a generic game of golf.
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TAR 10 - Fuel/Fowl. Either mash and press wet coal into bricks or weave a birdcage.
Mashing wet coal actually looked fun, almost like playing with clay or something. Sewing a birdcage together looked really complicated. Everybody immediately set off to mash wet coal, but one team got lost and stumbled on the birdcage task and did it just to finish the detour and it got them eliminated.
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TAR 13 - Play Like Mad/Act Like Fools. Either take lessons on how to play a dombra until you get a judge's approval and THEN play it in a park until you get $1.50 in tips OR put on a two-person cow costume, drink a glass of milk, and deliver yourselves to a butcher.
Learning an instrument takes a long time; the money requirement is trivial and probably wouldn't have been hard to get to, but we don't know for sure since nobody chose it. The cow task required walking a few blocks to two different locations and was clearly the easier and faster task.
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TAR 15 - Nobel Dynamite/Viking Alphabet. Either build yourselves a shelter and set off dynamite or decode a message on a runestone.
I don't know if the viking alphabet decryption would have been hard since since nobody chose it, but why would you decode a message when you can blow something up? Seems way more fun and way more straightforward.
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TAR 16 - In The Trenches/Under Fire. Either decode a message in Morse Code or crawl 100 feet under barbed wire.
This one blows my mind. Firstly, the Morse Code challenge was WAY harder than it had any right to be due to the distracting area and the fact that the message played on repeat without a clear start or end. TAR Canada had a mandatory Morse Code challenge that everyone managed to do, but this one was just brutal. The other challenge is just a generic physical challenge. The worst thing about this is that there was a U-Turn and the U-turned team was so stumped by the challenge that they lost their >2-hour lead over the last-place team. It was sad to watch. This is single-handedly the worst U-turn in the whole series. If any other detour this season had a U-turn, it wouldn't have phased me. Just another reason why this season is so terrible.
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TAR 18 - Long Hard Walk/Quick and Easy Meal. Either pick up and deliver a couch to a location 1-mile away or eat two servings of food on a Ferris Wheel.
Delivering the psychoanalysis couch was hard, but it was possible. Eating the two large servings of food was absolutely impossible. Everyone who attempted it didn't even come close and it's a challenge you can only reasonably attempt once for your personal safety.
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TAR 21 - Simit/Scrub-It. Either balance simits on a delivery board (that one teammate would have to balance on his/her head) and deliver them to 3 different locations or take a luxury bath.
Well, one of them requires good directions and balancing skills. The other one is completely effortless. Two teams actually chose Simit and I have to assume it's because they figured the bath would have been painful or would have taken longer (there have been painful massage tasks before after all.), but it was actually faster and was pleasant. Choosing Simit also means you miss out on a free luxury bath. Bummer. The two teams who chose to deliver simits ended up racing each other to avoid last place.
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TAR 25 - Flag/Shine - Run up a greased log to grab a flag or polish a helmet and a suit of armor.
Well, this one was a blind detour where teams had no context of what either challenge would be, so I am absolutely sure this one was meant to sabotage teams who chose wrong. The greased log challenge was borderline impossible while polishing armor is relatively easy.
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TAR 33 - Bring 'Em/Break 'Em - Deliver 300 plates to a location or break plates.
This was a no-brainer especially since it was immediately after an intense roadblock and was a perfect chance to vent one's frustration. Breaking plates was way easier and way faster.
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TAR 35 - Just for Kicks/Matter of Taste - Score exactly 66 points in a game of foot darts or memorize and be able to match 9 different mustards by taste.
The mustard challenge seemed reasonably challenging since most people did make mistakes, but the foot darts challenge seemed really hard since you had to get an exact score. One team managed it, but it took them a lot of tries.
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TAR 36 - Dance Vibe/Wall Scribe - Learn and perform a 30-second breakdance routine or solve a rebus puzzle.
Well, most of the teams who chose the Rebus puzzle solved it after a few tries since it seemed straightforward. I feel like the Firefighters might disagree with me though. Most of the teams actually chose the breakdance challenge despite it sounding much harder on paper and it took most of them dozens of tries.
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