You are misunderstanding the situation. The safari logo is a mess, we know what it means because we’ve seen the big res version. For a designer, this means that color can get in the way when pixels are limited and it makes then aware that too much detail can result in a visual mess, the solution is to create a logo that can work in monochrome and to make the necessary parts of the logo more prominent.
The safari logo removed the letters and focused on the compass metaphor. On Android, notification icons are monochrome, so this implies the app logo should also work in monochrome. What this all means is that a Designer is more likely to start with a monochrome and low detail logo icon and then start adding details if necessary, because removing detail is more difficult than adding.
I don’t think the picture you sent of Android 12 is actually from Android 12, at least I think it is from Samsung due to the icon colors, not AOSP. I really hate Samsung’s implementation of Material Design so I will not defend them, because it really sucks.
I was pointing out that even in the old iPhone, the actual division of items were made with colors and outlines, not with gradients, which are not great to actually create UIs
This is purely speculation on my part after using Material Design 3 for an App Redesign, but I think the actual Material You system probably started as a way to help developers get a color palette. Material Design 1 and 2 required the devs to actually code the colors(or get the palette from a website) and sometimes this resulted in weird combinations, Google simplified the process so devs can just add 3/4 colors and it is harmonized.
At some point they figured out it would be useful to have the seed be a dynamic image, like the new media stream controls on the quick settings which use the colors of the album cover. If there is already a tool go generate a palette from a picture, adding a way to generate the palette from the user wallpaper is a nice bonus.
Tl;dr: I think Material You is a bonus from the development and streamlining of Material Design color palette. As well as a greater understanding that designing with saturation is better than with colors due to the existence of color blind people.
The only colors that have a contrast issue in Material Design 3 is actually the surface container colors, but they are not meant to be used together without another means of separation, so it is fine