This, yes. The 'pause' button has a single, unambiguous meaning: 'pause the current action.' The hamburger menu means 'display in some fashion an unknown number of things of an indeterminate nature.' The hamburger menu is evidence of a lack of design rigor, the kitchen junk drawer of user experience design. It's sometimes necessary, but never ideal.

The context required to parse || as "pause" is just being in a context where pausing is possible. But we've accepted even less context-specific iconography for controls and navigation than even the pause icon; for example, why does × mean "close" when it's in the upper-right corner of a screen? It's fairly arbitrary, but — well, it means close, and it's not confusing. I think the hamburger icon in the upper-left corner of the screen is starting to (or already does) assume the same ubiquity: "main menu."

Hamburger menu is an abstraction. Part of the blame here is on operating systems and their branded menu's (think Windows Start or OSX Apple menu). There's no standard to it, which is why native apps are a lot easier to navigate because they conform to what the user expects. That fragmentation grows when you divide by the user's browser, device, etc. It's just not standard and not contextual enough to be a standalone icon.

    why does × mean "close" when it's in the upper-right corner of a screen

    | | pause
    |> play
    |>|> fast forward
    <|<| rewind
    |>|>| forward 1 track
    |<|<| backward 1 track

Now, your comparison to the hamburger menu does make sense, and I agree. However, the context for the hamburger menu might be "button that's alone" and it just means "menu." I can see that catching on.

Now if we took out all the stop signs and replaced them with a pause symbol with yellow and black text (thus erasing the existing contextual clues we use for stop signs), we'd see how clearly context matters to symbol recognition.