“Apple abandons its own guidance”
A good post by Jim Nielsen about icons in menus (in Tahoe).
This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” instead of an attitude of “Does the addition of a icon here, and the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?”
It seems a necessary ingredient of introducing icons to menus is thoughtfulness and guidance around when the icons are necessary/useful and when not.
It doesn’t help that the Tahoe icons seems to mess up indentation. (I haven’t updated to Tahoe and might skip it altogether. Even just the planetary-scale rounded corners are something that feels very broken.)