Yes, and there are many other tessellations you can use, if you texture it with a single texture. But you can't texture a whole planet with one texture if you allow zooming from planet to human scale, the texture would be terabytes. You must tile the sphere with textures that are loaded on demand, and textures are square, so it makes sense to divide the sphere into quads (actually a quadtree for zooming).

If you want to texture a sphere, the cubesphere is the best way to draw. It is what you get when you subdivide a cube using slerp instead of lerp for interpolation.

Icosahedron doesn't work well if you have textures. The triangle topology near the poles lead to bad texturing.

Icosahedron may work better if you have a fully procedural pipeline and don't need to worry about square textures.