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I can distinguish the icons of every site I visit on a semi-regular basis.

I guess you're not blind :)

Having only icons would be such an accessibility disaster.

And you never visit any other sites?

How useful to you is an unfamiliar favicon, or a row of tabs with an assortment of unfamiliar favicons?

An unfamiliar favicon lets me know I am not somewhere I normally would be, and to regard the site I am at more suspiciously. Without familiar favicons, I would treat every site that way before looking at the page more thoroughly. Obviously I do not rely solely on favicons, but they are a good initial way of orienting myself when looking at tabs.

In other words, the favicon is only useful for familiar sites or for knowing a page isn't from a familiar site. It's of absolutely no use in any other case, whereas a site name or a domain in the title tag will actually tell me what the site is in all cases.

There is a meta pattern I recognise in my tab bar sometimes - I get pairs of unfamiliarfavicon:hackernewsfavicon.

That it actually quite useful when I flick back to a random browser window after being distracted... ("Ahhh, that's my timewasting window!")

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