My inbox folders/labels used to be just text, and I'd have to read them to find the one I wanted to look at. I started adding emoji to the label names and suddenly I could scan the list far quicker to get to what I was looking for.

Granted, I had done this rather than the vendor deciding what icon fit - so I guess my brain had created neural pathways linking the image and the word.

Personally I think there's probably enough screen real estate to have both an icon and text in a menu entry, but menu search is generally more useful for anything not already an icon on the application's toolbar.