heh, I always saw the mono icon as a too small pointy closing bracket, building a bridge between gears, apps and framework… 
Thing is… I seem to have used distros (Arch, Debian) or now BSD and which shipped vanilla plasma and thus sport the default icon for the application launcher, splash screens and so on. So I grew accustomed to it.
IIrc many other distros customized it and replaced it with their brand logo (like SuSE, Fedora, Kubuntu) , so it wasn’t really present to their users.
But I agree, also outsider and if I don’t like the app launcher icon I can always change it to a Linux Distro or FreeBSD logo.