Yep. What would the modern equivalent of the save icon - a cloud or an generic IC representing the soldered-on SDD? Hard drives, floppies, or any other user-controlled storage devices are now out of fashion.
(It also displays a CRT with a Windows 95 BSOD for Samba network shares, but that's 100% on purpose.)
OTOH Apple's own apps haven't had a "save" button for a really long time now. Everything autosaves (and syncs to iCloud) automatically - use Undo if you need to. More complex apps, like Numbers, also automatically maintain a version history.
Icons make localisation much easier. In fact flat web design has evolved a fairly standard set of icons for basic operations. Most people know what a burger menu and x in the top corner of a window do. Same for copy, share, and so on.
The problem with Liquid Glass is that it's making the background style more important than the foreground content. No one cares if buttons ripple if they can't see what they do, because icons themselves are less clear and harder to read.
So I don't know what the point of this is.
Unifying the look with Apple's least successful, least popular, most niche product seems like a bizarre decision. I'm guessing the plan is to start adding VisionPro features in other products, but without 3D displays the difference between 3D and 2D metaphors is too huge to bridge.
I really liked Aqua. It was attractive and it was very usable.
This is... I don't know. It seems like style over substance for the sake of it, with significant damage to both.