Kudos to u/ProgramTechie on Reddit for figuring out the steps. Now that our 'device' is rooted and Xposed, we can start by setting the proxy.

It should say 'Xposed Framework version 89 is active.' and display a green checkmark. Restart the instance, and then open Xposed. Launch it again, and under the Xposed tab, press 'Patch', 'Install', and then 'Flash'. This will close the instance, so don't be surprised. Once the emulator has loaded, press 'Patch', then 'Install SuperSu', then 'Update Su binary'. Make sure you have Android Nougat (7.1), because BlueStacks Tweaker doesn't support the Android Pie beta yet. Once that is done, press the 'Play' button next to your emulator and wait for the emulator to load. This will unlock the emulator for rooting. Make sure the emulator is closed and press 'Unlock'. Open BlueStacks Tweaker and navigate to the 'Root' tab. The latest beta works with the latest version of BlueStacks 5 (5.9). This nifty program will allow us to root the emulator, as well as install Xposed. Once loaded, close the emulator and download the latest version of BlueStacks Tweaker. Once downloaded and installed, launch the application once and let the emulator fully load. For the emulator, I recommend downloading the latest 64-bit version of BlueStacks 5, since it supports Hyper-V. Of course, you will need to install Charles first. This article will teach you how to root the BlueStacks emulator and use it to proxy calls. Instead, I turned to an emulator I had used before, BlueStacks. Not only that, but it's meant for developers who can add their own SSL certificates into apps, which is impractical for reverse engineering, when we usually don't have access to the source code. Android Studio is completely unintuitive, and the emulator does not work on my machine at all. The first article I came across was from Mark Dappollone on Medium, but it was published back in 2017 and didn't address my main concern: installing Android Studio just to use its emulator is a massive waste of time and hard drive space.

Instead of buying a newer phone for my needs, I started looking towards emulators. Recently, I came across a problem: my trusty rooted Android 4 phone couldn't install an app whose API I wanted to reverse engineer, because the app was targeting Android versions 7 and above.

Bluestacks tweaker 4 user guide