The main problem with icons is that they need to be universally understood, otherwise they are a usability issue. In the past, this was achieved through Skeuomorphism and consistency across software.

However, as time has gone on Skeuomorphism has lost value, because people don’t necessarily recognize the old things they’re trying to reference. So we’ve been seeing a movement away from that for the past 10 years. But, then we run into another issue: the icons are new, and therefore unknown if not obvious. In addition, every software company seems to go their own way and have their own “style”, which is actually a big problem because users have to keep an absurd amount of iconography in their minds to use all their day to day software.

Text solves this, because text can inherently be read.