[ubercow13]

Those icons were incredibly visually distinct, despite being meaningless. I still know exactly what they are for instantly, in my peripheral vision, years after using many of them.

Modern icons are not only not comprehensible but not visually distinct (Tahoe making everything the same shape, many apps removing all colour from toolbar icons, various distinct if anachronistic symbolic icons like Save being replaced with slighly different orientations and arrangements of arrows and rounded rectangles...).

This severely impacts the efficiency of user interaction, especially after the first time you use something, at least for me. It's not a knee jerk reaction, it's a reaction to actually feeling it becoming harder to use my computer.