Most of those examples are company logos, and the branding for the company is different than the branding for its products.
So whereas Ford's brand is just a name, "Mustang" has a logo that really does tell you something about the car. You kind of understand when you see the galloping horse what it's meant to do.
Intel brands its CPUs with the name inside a square, which is colored to resemble (abstractly) a CPU.[0]
And Photoshop once had a logo that communicated what it did.[1]
As a brand becomes more established, it tends to be more abstract. Whereas Starbucks was once an elaborate siren (I interpreted it to be the siren call of espresso), details have been simplified over the years.[2] This is similar to the Photoshop magnifying glass logo becoming "Ps".
After the Apple I and Apple II, Apple sometimes used apple varieties (plus Lisa) to brand it's products (e.g. Macintosh, Newton). However, this largely stopped in the late 90s when Steve Jobs returned. Macintosh was shortened to Mac, and 'i' was prepended to various product names. Most new ones were descriptive e.g. iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch. The computers have retained "Mac" in the branding, along with "book" for notebooks (a convention predating Steve's return). The logos for all of these are just the names of the products typeset in its own San Francisco font; whenever Apple appears in a product name, the Apple logo is used instead.
So, yeah, I think it's reasonable to communicate what a product does or why a project exists with its logo. I didn't really see that w/ OctoSQL.
EDIT: I should also address Firefox & Chrome.
Firefox started as Phoenix (i.e. rising from the ashes of Netscape Navigator/Mozilla). Phoenix had a trademark conflict, so was renamed Firebird. This also had a conflict, and Firefox was chosen after. In the Zeitgeist of the early aughts, Phoenix made a ton of sense: instead of extremely bloated chrome around the page as had been prevalent in Navigator and Internet Explorer, Phoenix gave you a tab bar (truly revolutionary), the navigation bad and the bookmarks bar. It was simple and clean, like a reborn Phoenix.
Chrome is interesting because the name is not related to traveling or navigation. It's telling you it's just the container for what you care about. But the logo is a bit more like a sphincter or an all-seeing aperture. I've never gotten the logo for Chrome outside a spyware context, but it has become successful.
[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/pro...
[1] https://logos-world.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Adobe-Pho...
[2] https://miro.medium.com/max/2418/1*tJf7O6FPOmnErngygbBQDQ.pn...
