There's new CSS capabilities [0] that can help solve this problem better now via alignment-baseline [1] and text-box-trim [2].
[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/css-inline-3/#leading-trim
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...
Recently found the lh unit approach. It’s elegant for centering icons along the first line in dynamic, sometimes wrapping text.
God, this was so complicated to understand just to get an icon aligned properly with multi-line text. Someone needs to re-design CSS from scratch. Its has become a rube goldberg machine of complexity.