> it's the representations that are not really representative to everyone.

That's true of virtually every graphical representation in a computer application. Save icon? How about folders? Where I'm from, folders (the physical item) never took off. Even today, we use a sort of slimmed-down binder for small collections of documents. For millions of people, myself included, the folders in Windows 95 and Windows 98 were the first ones we ever saw. That never prevented anyone from learning how to use them, or figuring out what the "Open..." button does.

So yeah, "Click the folder button to open" never worked, for the same reason -- no one had ever seen a folder. But the button was visually distinctive enough that you could say "click the yellow button in the toolbar, it's way up there on the left".

Very few icons are really globally unambiguous (and I still think designers in the early/mid-'90s really had the right idea when they just put the frickin' text next to, or below the damn icon). But making all icons look basically the same makes an already difficult situation even worse.

Just my anecdote...

The folder metaphor helped me grasp what was going on. The first computers I spent significant time with were BBCs. They had two filesystems: DFS and ADFS (I think). The Advanced Disk Filing System had folders, but all the documentation I found called them "files". Files could point to files and make a tree of files. 11 year old me just gave up on this. Why would you want a tree of files? Why should a file link to a file...? Nonsense.

Folders (in Gem and Windows) made MUCH more sense. Aaah... it's for organising ideas. Bingo!

Yeah, things were very bad for 10 year-old me: in English, the slimmed-down binder we use around here for, well, filing, is called a file. It made absolutely zero sense that "a folder is a collection of files" and "a file is a document". We didn't use folders, and a real-life file usually had several documents.

It was pretty stupid but it made sense on its own after a while.

It's a visually distinct symbol that a child can quickly learn to recognize, and generalize to other contexts.

You can do a lot worse.

I'm actually genuinely curious if young people have an issue with the floppy disk icon. I feel like at this point it's meant "save" longer than it was actually physically in use.

For the first time, about two weeks ago, I told someone to click the blue floppy disk to save and they said “what’s a floppy disk?”

I’m only in my mid twenties and that even made me almost say “what the hell did you just say?” out loud.

Icons are always abstractions. Their purpose is to succinctly distinguish one thing from another. In isolation they are sometimes disconnected from the original meaning, particularly if the original meaning was an abstract idea rather than a concrete object.

Are you bothered that “A” no longer means “cattle” because that is where it started.

In the original GUI interfaces you had a combination of icons where space was tight and menus with functions represented by words. That made a lot of sense when very few people had experience with how computers work. Now that more people are familiar with how they work it is not surprising that menus are de-emphasized.

This. Most critics here seem to be thinking of "how it used to be" in the good old days, without considering it from the eyes of new users currently being introduced to computers and how they might perceive things.