alt Hacker NewsRight, this article overlooks the difference between a first encounter and regular encounters. The concise representation pays off when you do learn it, as long as it's executed well.
And I'm fine with a bit of cognitive exploration to figure out a green check and red X scheme rather than see a whole table column filled up with words like "active" and "inactive". The former allows more columns on screen at once. Horizontal scrolling is a worse impediment to assimilating information from a table.
I would almost always rather have the words; words are things I can easily search for and manipulate using the text-processing tools in my possession.
Personally, my brain "page faults" whenever it has to interpret an emoji, which makes most use of in-line icons far worse than the text they represent. I expect few people have this problem, but I also expect that I'm not the only one with it.