a.k.a. People are using whatever Dall-E 3 give them without curation and believing they're designers.
Yeah, but isn't text to image kinda the perfect tool for creating certain UI? The point of an icon is to compress/transform some idea/action/whatever into an image that communicates exactly what it does/what it represents. And often the thing you want an icon for isn't some concrete concept you can represent with 5 lines, but a label that language has converged on to describe a broad but fuzzy category of stuff.
Like, if you have an eCommerce store and you want an icon for mops, doesn't it kinda make sense to take your top 100 selling mops and blend them together into an icon?
Not really, because in this case, it’s better to just use the word “mops” and be done with it. You use icons when people are familiar with them. You do not invent them on a whim.