These don't seem to be well thought at all. While reading the article, I've started wondering if they were chosen by an LLM after some developers decided it wasn't worth the trouble of going through every single application and choosing icons for every single menu item. That would explain a lot, in my opinion.
What likely happened is that design leadership commanded that everything needs to have an icon, and most of the individual developers tasked with updating the menus just pick the next best icon from the provided icon library, because there exists no further guidance or oversight. There’s probably a designated procedure for requesting new icons, but why bother if nobody is checking your work.
