alt Hacker NewsNo. It's laziness and bad design. It's the most generic trash icon from the most generic icon set.
Same with "add row above/below" or the completely distinct action Create Filter/Filter by cell value.
They can be trivially improved with about 1 millisecond of conscious thought. Especially given the fact that these actions have been around in office software for literal decades, and more often than not with their own distinct icons.
I don't know how they can be trivially improved.
I vaguely recall seeing some product with toolbar icons that attempted to depict a cell as part of a row, or column, with an "x" in the corner to indicate delete. I could never decipher them. It was all too small. Plus the "x" looked just like the "+" at a glance since it was so small. Even though every icon was distinct and meaningful, each icon was also ultimately a complicated jumble that took longer to decipher than just reading the label next to it.
So when you say "They can be trivially improved with about 1 millisecond of conscious thought," I completely disagree. It's actually really hard and there's a good reason they choose not to. And maybe don't be so insulting?