it's as if the icons get added by a lazy LLM prompt during CI

Which is probably exactly what happened. Reportedly Apple is all-in on Claude across the board.

Nah, blaming AI is too easy. It's more likely that Apple's design culture got rotted out under Alan Dye https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job

Now that Dye is gone, I still hold out hope that Apple will change direction and start fixing their UI. But that fact that it got this bad in the first place implies things are seriously broken at a senior leadership level.

What makes you think that things aren't bad under him?