A good icon should telegraph to the user as soon and as swiftly as possible the identification and purpose of the app/folder/thing it represents.

Photorealism is pretty good at that, since objects tend to look like themselves and nothing else, meaning they are unambiguous, and afford familiarity because even if your trash can at your desk looks nothing like the old photorealistic silver mesh trash can from Macs of yore, you can still probably figure out what it is really fast.

I am sick and tired of overwrought artsy fartsy mimmimulizsm hierogplyhic “icons” instead of something I can actually fucking see and recognize.

"In my opinion, this is exactly the opposite of what a good icon should be like (reduced, stylized, simplified to the extreme)."

Now we have icons where you basically can't tell what this is about and more and more icons look extremely similar. Not sure this is better.

> this is exactly the opposite of what a good icon should be like (reduced, stylized, simplified to the extreme)

Why do you believe that? Is an icon a pictogram or ideogram?

There is no reason why an icon can't be skeuomorphic. Flat design was inspired by Swiss design, which really only existed because of technical constraints of graphic design in the 50s and 60s.

An icon should indicate what the program does, and with higher quality displays, there's no reason why more detail in the icon would be worse. Icons aren't logos in the sense they have to be adapted for every possible use case (where those use cases may have technical limitations), e.g. on a huge box truck, embroidered on a shirt, or as a favicon.