Ah yes they did change the ad indicator as you described, but that's not what the pushback was against. They briefly changed desktop search to include favicons

Ah yes they did change the ad indicator as you described, but that's not what the pushback was against. They briefly changed desktop search to include favicons next to every native search result, making it way harder to quickly see what was and wasn't an ad (since every result had some image next to it). They rolled that back and it has not returned (yet). Check the screenshot from the first article you linked for the difference.