+1 for a way to use different icons or suppress the icons. Having a icon exactly the same for each item in the list doesn’t really add anything for me.
In case it helps anyone, here is CSS which suppresses the in Discourse Doc Categories sidebar lists but doesn’t suppress the sidebar icons/dots elsewhere in Discourse.
.discourse-docs-sidebar-panel {
.sidebar-section-link .sidebar-section-link-prefix {
display: none !important;
}
.sidebar-section-link-content-text {
margin-left: 10px;
}
}
The margin-left: 10px;
bit can be tweaked to align the text in a visually pleasing way to you.
Just put this in your custom theme CSS (or make it part of a bespoke theme component in your site for convenience)