Comment by HelloNurse

> seems fairly clearly to be talking about icons of known sizes, in which case that advantage disappears.

That's the point: obliviousness to different concerns and their importance.

Among mature people, the main reason to use SVG is scaling vector graphics (in different contexts, including resolution-elastic final rendering, automatically exporting bitmap images from easy to maintain vector sources, altering the images programmatically like in many icon collections); worrying about file sizes and rendering speed is a luxury for situations that allow switching to bitmap images without serious cost or friction.