Though it’s decayed somewhat in recent releases, I think the Cocoa/AppKit toolbar widget is a great example of how all parties can be made happy. Right-click any standard Mac app toolbar and you get options for text + icons or icons only as well as sometimes the option to shrink the toolbar items (depending on the app).

So when a user first starts using an app, they might leave it on the default of text+icons, but once they’ve used it long enough to build familiarity they can elect to hide the text and shrink the icons to save screen real estate if they want to.

Unfortunately it’s become the norm for toolbars to have zero adjustability, a trend that I feel was mostly popularized by Chrome, which has had a mostly static toolbar since its inception.