In fact, some of the government reminders can seem cruel to westerners. For example, public signs that count the number of drunk driving deaths per month.
The reason why everything important in Singapore has to be in picture language is because they have so many nationalities living together.
If I remember correctly, the subway signs were already in English, Malaysian and Chinese. But there's also plenty of Indian, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Thai citizens. And of course Japanese tourists.
An 8-language sign starts to be unwieldy, so I applaud their approach of using graphics instead.
You could have the following without the pictures: https://pradt.co/imgs/poster/pleasedoit02.gif
There's different styles to this, there's variations which are more Disney or Anime like, what's the issue? The point is to draw attention, I don't see what the need is for the ostensible seriousness, if it's not effective at educating and drawing people in to your message.