The menu bar was always just text.
The toolbars offered several options: large/medium/small/no icons, text/no text.
(Not all of those options were always available.)
This let you progress as a user of a system. When you first experienced it you could use the large icons with text because it made the things you were searching for standout. As you learned the icons you could start shrinking them, and eventually remove the text. This opened up the toolbar to fit many more actions (often less frequently used). And the tool tip from hovering remained throughout, so in the worst case of an ambiguous (or unknown) icon, you could hover over it and learn what it did. Additionally, you'd often get the shortcut for the action when hovering over the button (or viewing it in the menu bar).
Many contemporary applications don't provide their users with this notion of progression.
The widgets that can be placed on that are buttons with icon & text (either of which could be hidden) that can be regular, toggle, or drop-down; and text and combo boxes. Well, and custom widgets, of course, but the point is that they were different from regular widgets in that they were toolbar-aware. IIRC this all first came as part of IE "common controls" library, even before it was shipped as part of the OS.
So then a top-level menu is just a band with a bunch of buttons with drop-downs that have hideen icons. A regular Win9x-style toolbar is a band with a bunch of buttons with icons but hidden text, and an occasional text box or combo box. And so on.
But the real nifty thing about these is that they could be customized easily, and it was traditional for Win32 apps to expose that to the user. At first it was just about showing/hiding stuff, but Office especially gradually ramped things up to the point where the user could, essentially, construct arbitrary toolbars and menus out of all commands available in the app, assign arbitrary shortcuts to them etc. So if you wanted icons in your main menu, or text-only toolbars, you could have that, too! This wasn't something that regular users would do, but I do recall it not being uncommon for power users of a specific app to really tailor it to themselves.
Visual Studio has it to this day, and takes it to 11 by further allowing to customize context menus through the same UI: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-cus...
While there is no disputing Windows copy heavily from the Mac UI, the actual feel of that interface was also strongly influenced by the IBM Common User Access (CUA).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
Not only did Windows try to follow those CUA rules, Microsoft encouraged Windows applications to also follow those rules.
That meant that from a user perspective, the Windows experience was fairly consistent irrespective of which application was being used.
But the Mac almost never had just icons in the ui. There would usually be an icon and a text. With little space you'd revert to text only.
Apple had a team of expert Usability experts. Others... did not. So they just copied something that looked cool and was easy to implement.
That it cut down on internationalizion efforts surely didn't hurt either.