I’ve experienced the UI for a long time so I’m not the best to evaluate how it might be for an uninitiated visitor. I have seen posts like “how do I find this?” and “I didn’t know that did that” but I can’t recall ever seeing a post about UX problems involving the Icons / Tags in the topic title lists. Not that anyone who has would make the problem known, but do you know of even a single user that has reported an issue?
That is not to say that a “I would design this differently” shouldn’t be able to be changed. Have you tried using CSS to style them more to your liking but run into problems that something like having a class value would solve?