Not just muted--I look at them and I genuinely feel like my vision is getting worse. I have this giant, beautiful high DPI display, but the icons don't look sharp anymore--they look like someone downsampled then upsampled them with a gaussian blur. Very weird choice for a company that used to pride themselves on the "retina" resolution of their display technology.

I feel like peak Apple icon design was around 2014, where they were high-resolution and clearly depicted what the application was. Since then, they are all moving towards these indistinct, abstract hieroglyphics.

In actual use, the icons are layered and have more visual separation than is shown when flattened down.

Still might not address your concerns, but I also don’t think the site currently shows them accurately

What if they took a page out of Microsoft's icon playbook, where all their icons look the same? To this day I still accidentally click the wrong Office icon on my work computer because they all look so similar.