[wwalexander]

> In addition, every software company seems to go their own way and have their own “style”

Hence Apple using the same set of SF Symbols across all their platforms. And I don't think icons are intended to be used to initially identify the purpose of a button, but instead to provide a quick visual anchor once you are already familiar. Sure, there are some buttons that everyone will use more (like Save or Open), but I don't think there's anything wrong with allowing every button to have this sort of quick visual lookup. Predicting user behavior is hard.

[preg_match]

But they don’t actually, Apple will use different icons for the same function across their platforms (and even on the same platform across applications!) That was part of the problem with the menu icons.