The problem is not only do all text labels have different sizes in one language, they also have completely different unrelated sizes in other languages.

Standardized icons can be laid out easily regardless of language

I've heard that argument... used multiple times, for an application which would basically never be in any other language but English.

Not an option, because it makes it harder work to sell a product to the Chinese.

the RTL languages are also a pain point, and even German can make your UI designing difficult for length of words. Really, the high variability of width for i18n'ed words in general is I think where the icon-heavy approach originated.

I was using a cheap device the other day and it had:

[◂] [xxx] [▸]

Left button was UP and right button was DOWN (numbers e.g. temperature).

Is there any reason that ◂ would be UP in Chinese?

Sort of. 上 means both up and previous, 下 means down and next. Maybe there was miscommunication about contexts when the button meant next and when it meant down in the UI.

The question of whether that's a good thing is a different matter, however.

The brain is better with images once it has been trained to recognize them. Just sucks for the people that never got the training.

No it isn't. That's why hieroglyphics became indecipherable for nearly 2000 years, while all the various alphabetic systems invented during that time--and many of those invented long before--remained readable.

Ugaritic certainly didn't remain readable and it was alphabetic. The only reason alphabetic systems remained readable is because they remained in use.

uhhh I can pick out a person shaped icon from a column of icons faster than the word person from a column of words