In the first example the items are grouped by topic (such as “printing”), which I think makes sense. When you go select a “frequent” action, it’s useful to see

In the first example the items are grouped by topic (such as “printing”), which I think makes sense. When you go select a “frequent” action, it’s useful to see which “less frequent” but related actions exist nearby. And the icons not being all grouped together but being (partially) isolated actually helps in better recognizing them. It’s from Microsoft Word ('97, I believe), by the way. A later version had “expandable” menus that by default only showed the most frequently used options, and on expansion (or by global setting) then also showed the other options. Many users didn’t like that, however, either because they missed that the menu could be expanded and thus didn’t find the item they were looking for, or because the expansion changed the relative locations of the items, meaning they were at an unexpected position depending on the expansion mode; or just because the expansion required an extra click. I’m just noting this because Microsoft deemed the topical grouping of items within the menu important enough that they kept it, orthogonal to the expansion mechanism. And they doubled down on the grouping with the later ribbon interface — which I personally dislike because it’s not linearly greppable and feels jumbled, and they felt the need to give every item an icon there, whether memorable or not.