I completely agree with your points about cutting down on unlabelled buttons and animations. I’ve posted previously about how slow the new app gets, especially when a lot of observation drafts are saved. If any change at all can speed it up, it’s necessary; I’ve resorted to using the old app again.
The lack of labelling the icons caused me to select the wrong option on several menus several times as I got used to the new app. I’m not sure how intuitive an icon like “camera with sparkles” is to the general public; I don’t think “AI Camera” is a concept in wider use, either, though I could be wrong. I’m especially not fond of the photo folder upload screen’s options, where the dark grey combine/split options are not any sort of universal symbol that I’d encountered before. I could not figure it out the first time, when I needed to combine additional photos quickly, and just went to start an observation draft with the “no media” option and then add photos through the “edit observation” screen instead, just because that was at least intuitive if familiar with the old app.