that's just sunk cost fallacy. The icons are also publicly available and can be used on projects conforming to the Apple branding, so it's not truly a waste.

https://developer.apple.com/sf-symbols/

If anything, the waste would have arguably been putting people to work on a feature that needed to get removed in the first place. If there's any post-mortem to be done, it's "why did this get released in the first place, and how do we make sure we don't spent time on something like it again?"

That is true.

I thought this was funny to see as well, although these icons redesigns happen with every MacOS release I think: https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-golden-gate-i...