What were the MS-DOS programs that the moricons.dll icons were intended for?

I used these all the time when rolling out Windows 3.1 and 3.11 for thousands of computers back in the early 90's.

You would just pick any icon that seemed relevant, with a focus on not choosing the same icon for two different applications.

Computer GUI's were so new then that people didn't really care if the icon was 100% correct or not.

Sometimes for big applications I would draw up an icon and then use it, but mainly try to stay on moricons.dll or any dll's that came with the application that might contain icons.

This. You just needed something and we were starved for icons with the default install, so I would just dig around to find an icon that half-way matched what the application (never "app" then) was.

I find it funny that I use adaptive icons on android (the ones that switch color according to the OS color scheme) and I override non adaptive app icons the exact same way.

Local public transport app? Choose something resembling a bus, train or similar. Banking app? Pile of money or bill or whatever. Just as long as two apps don’t end up with the same icon it’s all fine.

What is old is new I guess.