From an accessibility/localization stand point, icons+text everywhere seems to be ideal.

Also, I disagree with:

> This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space”

Sure, that does technically happen, but is in no way preventative or mutually exclusive with the follow on thought:

> Does ... the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?

That still happens, because if they mismatch an icon with text, that can result in far worse cognitive load/misunderstanding than if no icon was present at all. This becomes readily apparent in his follow on thought experiment where you show someone a menu with icons+text, but "censor" the text. Icons+text is also superior to [occasionally icons]+text in the same thought experiment. From my perspective, the author just argued against their own preference there.

I'd argue that the thought process behind determining an appropriate icon is even more important and relevant when being consistent and enforcing icon+text everywhere, not diminished. It also has the broadest possible appeal (to the visual/graphically focused, to the literary focused, to those who either may not speak the language, and/or to those who are viewing the menu with a condensed/restrictive viewport that doesn't have room for the full text). Now, if the argument is predicated on "We aren't willing to pay a designer for this" then yeah, they have a point. Except they used Apple as an example so, doubt that was the premise.