I had some time to test today and this is working for me on the current version of Stellaris. If you are having issues, I will need specifics to have any chance of fixing them.

a good amount of devs of major mods are also in this server so yeah def check it out

had no luck with the patch notes, but you can join the stellaris modding den and ask for help https://discord.com/bHVez2C

Is there a guide somewhere on what changed recently for portrait mods? I wasn't able to find much helpful with Google.

update when

i love pixel and i love cute stuff i loved this mod xD

Yes. I toyed with making it not so, but that requires setting up a separate species class for just one portrait set and introduces more jank than I thought it was worth.

can this randomly be used by the AI?