The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.
Since the eyes are the cursor, this is a problem. Desktop and mobile don’t have this issue.
> The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.
And Apple decided this was a problem with icons, rather than a problem with the way they implemented their vision tracking? Believable, and laughable.
It seems like the opposite of this. They tried to adapt the system to the way the eyes naturally work, rather than trying to tell people they needed to overcome their biology to use the system.
Regardless, you don't need to make the hitboxes one-to-one with the graphics. Indeed, doing so tends to make for unreliable hitboxes, so most picking systems have two different, idealized enter and exit hitboxes for each icon.