I feel sorry for the designers that had to work on the redesign that introduced these icons in the first place. They had to add a bunch of padding around the b

I feel sorry for the designers that had to work on the redesign that introduced these icons in the first place. They had to add a bunch of padding around the buttons in the toolbar based on a top-down redesign mandate. Buttons needed to be big enough to be used with fingers/touchscreens, with one glorious responsive UI for desktop and mobile. They discovered that labels didn't fit inside the "safe area" for certain languages, like German (and monitors had lower resolutions then). The icons were a compromise. And then desktop web stagnated under a "mobile-first" mandate from the top. (Since then, the mandate-du-jour has changed.) One of the great things about the newest GMail redesign is that there are settings around this -- you can make the padding narrower and you can change the UI to use text labels again.