As a minor language nerd, I would like to posit a 2.5, if you will: memery as a dialect and individual memes as bespoke words.

Like, consider this sequence of emoji: 🌍 🧑‍🚀 🔫 🧑‍🚀

Chances are, you're familiar enough with memes that you can infer the meaning of an English sentence which has nothing to do with the actual representational meaning of those emoji independently. By placing them in this specific context, I have communicated a meaning beyond their intended representation.

By a similar token, different specific memes under the same genre (e.g. Gigachad) may be equated with synonyms, and different contexts may call for different "words" (i.e. individual memes).

I pray Lord Apollo is kind enough to me for that to make sense because Hypnos is buzzing 'round my head and it's getting hard to think