If you want to experience the frustration of text not being text, take a look at one of the main train ticket booking websites in China https://www.12306.cn/index/
Plain old text that can be selected is always going to be the most user friendly to non-native speaker users.
The question then is on the balance of trade offs which user group experience is the one you want to cater more to, non native speakers or keyboard-only users.
Edit: I love how one of the icons is 票 - perfectly self explanatory to Chinese speakers. Good luck if you don't speak Chinese which goes to show that icons are cultural to some degree
I think we can admit that Chinese always does it in its special way, so it's not really a great example. Not many Chinese people would use their web client to book tickets, the mobile app is much more user-friendly - as long as you have ample knowledge to navigate through the system.
Plain old text that can be selected is always going to be the most user friendly to non-native speaker users.
The question then is on the balance of trade offs which user group experience is the one you want to cater more to, non native speakers or keyboard-only users.
Edit: I love how one of the icons is 票 - perfectly self explanatory to Chinese speakers. Good luck if you don't speak Chinese which goes to show that icons are cultural to some degree