Three reasons for people declaring modded icons as OBJECTIVELY bad:
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People have often never actually tried "small" icon option for advanced strategic icons. Their opinions are based on medium usuallly, which does have a little more overlap than Vanilla.
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Screen resolution. The more resolution you have, the bigger the icons should be or the less it matter when they are bigger. It doesnt make sense to judge icon size without taking resolution into account.
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The more you use an icon set, the more you get used to it. It gets engrained in your brain just like flickshot muscle memory gets engrained in an FPS players brain. I guess a very good players stops seeing icons and can just directly read the screen. This works with both Vanilla and modded icon set if you stay with the same set.
However, if a player now watches a caster that uses different icons, he now longer reads the screen with as little effort as before. This is still not a good reason to claim that modded icons are somehow super bad. I use modded icons but i still have not trouble watching casts with unmodded icons. But small, maybe even subconcious inconveniences can sometimes lead very strong opinions.