Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes The icons are as important as the keyboard shortcuts and menu items It costs nothing (except a few pixels) to put a visual reminder on screen of something you "should do" frequently I've watched people only ever copy/paste via right-click Others via the buttons at the top of the window Others via the Edit menu And others using the keyboard shortcuts Why make a product less usable to some people just because you k…
A few pixels is a very big cost when all you have is 640x480 of them. UI clutter affects usability too. I’ll grant that while Microsoft Office is the only place I can remember seeing save buttons over all those years, for most people throughout the 90s and 00s, Microsoft Office was all they ever used. It might as well have been synonymous with software to them. I suppose there was a window of time when screens were l…
No one said you are "requiring users to click a button" - it's an affordance to end users indicating more possible actions are available (and, probably, "good")
Just like no one said you have to go to File->Save
Or press [cmd]-[s] (or [ctrl]-[s] if you're not on a Mac)
Sure - if you happen to enforce autosave, it's probably OK to remove the save button: but not everyone wants everything to autosave (probably more often than not, I expressly DO NOT WANT any changes I've made (visually or otherwise) to be expressed into the underlying file)