When you say that icons without text give a cognitive load on the brain, you completely forget that people are speaking in completely different languages. And I have a lot of examples from life (before and after the appearance of Google Translate), as the impact of the interface language on site visitors. The icons are most convenient in this respect, because more friendly to the visitor. The icons are more familiar to everyone, and do not burden a person with unfamiliar words or hieroglyphs.
And it’s important not to forget this when it comes to Google’s projects, which are ambitiously aimed at the whole world. And increasingly it wants to erase the boundaries of the language barrier. Therefore, I see logical their experiments in this direction.
I read this article through Google Translate. And also translated into English.
Sorry for bad English…