haha you can turn the snow off at the top, I guess holiday spirit and all that

I think, a big part of it is that people are now generally used to computers, so user interfaces don't have to be as intuitive anymore. A crappy interface won't directly affect your sales anymore, so corporations will naturally invest less money into it and may choose looks/branding over usability.

Having said that, that they took their perfectly fine icon implementation and made it worse, that necessarily involved an idiot in charge. A non-idiot would've just left it as-is, at no cost at all.

The irony is amazing. What terrible design.

The fact that having too many icons creates clutter is something I didn't think of before, but makes perfect sense in retrospect. Putting icons next to items that are most commonly used helps draw attention to them, and when you see it side by side it's clear that being selective works a lot better. Good UI design is really hard to do, and not always intuitive I find. Apple used to put a lot of work into doing actual UX research, and they've published a lot of interesting insights over the years, but seems like they just kind of stopped caring now.

Blame Apple. "tahoe icons" is a reference to the "icons in tahoe". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Tahoe

the problem is that when you have too many icons they become noise, having icons for common tasks quickly draws your attention to those tasks and makes it easier to find them