Icons in menus do follow the 2025 HIG: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

The author is criticising 2025 macOS for not following the 2005 HIG. This is not reasonable criticism, the HIG are not set in stone and they have changed many times in the past 20 years.

The link you attached still contains these:

> Don’t display an icon if you can’t find one that clearly represents the menu item

> Not all menu items need an icon. Be careful when adding icons for custom menu items to avoid confusion with other existing actions, and don’t add icons just for the sake of ornamentation.

> Instead of adding individual icons for each action, or reusing the same icon for all of them, establish a common theme with the symbol for the first item and rely on the menu item text to keep the remaining items distinct

And if you go do the work of tracking down newer HIG versions, they say the exact same thing.

2014:

"Avoid displaying an icon for every menu item. If you include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value. A menu that includes too many icons (or poorly designed ones) can appear cluttered and be hard to read."

Newer versions seem to have escaped being properly archived anywhere, so Apple can gaslight us all into believing the HIG has never changed, that we have always been at war with East Asia, that giving a bad icon to every single menu icon has always been good, and that rule was never arbitrarily changed at the whims of a cardboard box designer and his liquid glarse aesthetics.

It works out though because it does give me ammo when people use these guidelines to thoughtlessly defend poor design as if they are axiomatic rules. For 20+ years having lots of icons in a menu was bad...but now...it's good! Why? I dunno! It just is!