MS would include superfluous icons because they observe it in other software and can't think for themselves, or they would omit superfluous icons because it never occurred to them in the first place.
Everything Apple does is carefully considered, good and bad.
I take the latter every time, because I understand how bad things are in software. I know it's unrealistic to be as choosy as I want to be.
Couldn't Apple have just, like, talked to the people who originally wrote the guidelines? Why do they need to re-invent the wheel? Will Apple forget again in another 15 years and need to re-run the experiment, taking us all along as test subjects?
Decisions should be revisited when it makes sense to do so.
It would have been a very easy thing to test the people outside there bubble.
When I read a sentence like this, I have to remind myself that this is Apple products we're talking about.
What other company do you feel surpasses Apple in terms of "judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place"?
Is there any consumer electronics company today that ships products that are in any way less of a slop than Apple?
Alan Dye really did a number on that company and set back UI design by one or two decades, favoring graphic design over human interface design.