Maybe I'm just a weirdo but those icons seem perfectly intuitive to me.
The two points in the icons provide two exactly opposite messages, and the wrong one is larger than the correct one, thus GP's confusion.
You pretty much have to have a very specific image of a d-pad in mind. It helps that that d-pad is also the one in your hands, but you shouldn't have to look at the controller, or have its detailed look memorized, to figure it out.
I think what happened here is obvious: there’s a very longstanding software design pattern that was broken by a perfectly sensible hardware controller design. The solution is likely to just stop using that software pattern. Make analogous icons or whatnot.