I noticed that depending on the configured icon size it would spend a significant amount of time in KPixmapModifier::scale. I don't see a point in requesting a fixed icon size and then scale it down manually as opposed to having the KIconLoader do the scaling for us. Especially for SVGs it could then even serve us a properly rendered SVG for this size rather than a scaled down pixmap version.

I dug in git history to see where this came from but this has been in there forever as far as I can tell.
The only reason I can see is to explicitly prefer downsampling the icon pixmap over upsampling?

Tried with Breeze and Oxygen themes, didn't notice any difference. Small icons still switch to symbolic in Breeze.