Annotations
The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are looking for faster.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.
These are not some obscure, unique operations. These are OS basics, these are foundational. Every app has them, and they are always in the same place. They shouldn’t look different!
Icons are supposed to be easily recognizable from a distance. Every icon designer knows: small details are no-go. You can have them sometimes, maybe, for aesthetic purposes, but you can’t rely on them. And icons in Tahoe menus are tiny. Most of them fit in a 12×12 pixel square (actual resolution is 24×24 because of Retina), and because many of them are not square, one dimension is usually even less than 12.
For Tahoe icons, Apple decided to use vector fonts instead of good old-fashioned bitmaps. It saves Apple resources—draw once, use everywhere. Any size, any display resolution, any font width. But there’re downsides: fonts are hard to position vertically, their size doesn’t map directly to pixels, stroke width doesn’t map 1-to-1 to pixel grid, etc. So, they work everywhere, but they also look blurry and mediocre everywhere
In Tahoe, though, some menu items have icons, some don’t, and they are aligned differently
Of course, advice on how to adapt your icons to black-and-white displays is obsolete. But the principles—as long as they are good principles—still apply, because they are based on how humans work, not how computers work.
In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.