The current icons really aren't that good. Looking at apple specifically: The facetime and messages icons are almost completely indistinguishable. Get angry and say I'm blind, but so is a lot of the userbase - like legitimately, legally blind people.

The camera icon on iOS is just a fucking camera lens with a grey background. No context.

The calculator one is actually pretty good.

The photos one is also bullshit lol.

Sure, but it's not clear they're unrelated. Maybe interesting is necessary (but not sufficient) for usability?

Also, the newer icons don't really indicate a word processing application. If anything, they're look like they might be for a drawing program. So regardless of interesting/abstract/whatever, it seems like a poor icon choice.

Usable icons _are_ a bit interesting. A bunch of same shapes with same-ish colors on a grid is NOT prioritizing usablity. It's prioritizing minimalism. The middle icons in that list are interesting enough that your visual cortex can pattern-match to your previous experience selecting that app without much conscious effort. The oldest is a bit much but at least still recognizable (not necessarily "well known", that's different), but the new ones are worse: so boring and generic that it takes actual conscious effort to select them from a sea of sameness.