Stephen Lemay

Apple's revised guidelines now say use menu icons "sparingly and with purpose," and "don't display an icon if you can't find one that clearly represents the menu item." Several users had stayed on older macOS specifically to dodge the change.

The dissent: one engineer says it's not the design team that produces this, it's a structural failure to listen to customers — and the cleaner fix was never icons-or-no-icons, but letting users choose.