The meanings of icons can also be highly dependant on culture, we just tend to ignore those dependencies easier than with text.

But if they are doing accessibility they have to create alt text for the icons anyway and that needs to be translated. So the only i18n complexity left would the ltr vs rtl languages and depending on how you place the text they wouldn’t need to really change the layout to accommodate both.

As someone who's done a fair amount of frontend work, the hard part is always squeezing text into a clean UX.

The problem language is usually German, so if you have copy like "share screen", you have to find a way to fit in 12 (2x English) 'M' characters comfortably.

They're institutionalized into replacing text with icons.

And they'll never know people are struggling. How would they?