[michaelevensen]

Designer here. I agree that sometimes there is an over-emphasis of sticking to the rule of icon - title (if it's already been defined) and finding icons for features that are very hard to describe through a simple pictogram, thus leading to non-helpful visual cues for menus and menu items. But, icons to me has never been about being a perfect encapsulation of the meaning of the feature, it's more of a visual anchor, eg even the examples in this article without icons require me a couple more milliseconds to scan just to find the menu item I'm looking for. It's a visual anchor first, a descriptor second.

[yakshaving_jgt]

I've heard this kind of reasoning from a number of designers, and it strikes me as post hoc justification for aesthetic self-indulgence.

So, with the greatest of respect, I don't believe you. It does not take you "a couple more milliseconds to scan", since a couple of milliseconds is well below human perceptible thresholds for almost every sense.

There is no accessibility improvement here — you just like the consistency.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18465408/

[kvirani]

I do like how in some MacOS examples we see icons for some of the more important or commonly used menu items, but not the others in the same list. The absence of icons has meaning ("it's likely not what you want")

[immibis]

If you have an icon next to every entry and they all look the same on first glance, you don't have visual anchors.