Jim Nielsen laments how Tahoe has introduced icons in menus everywhere:
It’s extra noise to me. It’s not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful. It’s more that I don’t like the idea of “give each menu item an icon” being the default approach.
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?”
In the 2020 edition of its Human Interface Guidelines, Apple previously advised to minimise the use of icons. It said: “use icons in menus only when they add significant value. A menu that includes too many icons may appear cluttered and be difficult to read.”
That is gone now, and the nudge is on using them to “help people recognise common actions throughout the app”. Both stances are valid, arguably they should co-exist: how the icons have been implemented isn’t particularly clear, it can indeed feel overwhelming. Prioritising which actions get an icon (Jim uses the “Move & Resize” contextual menu as a useful application) would introduce some hierarchy.