It is a bit cheesy, yeah? But I do like the simplistic, big buttons with clear pictures. I don't want to have to take an extra second to decipher a material-design pictograph that sacrifices some aspect of understanding for visual aesthetic. Waze gets their users on the value the app brings to people, not how good it looks. There aren't many other players in the field of crowd-sourced traffic data like Waze shows (at least in the US) so I don't see them working on updating the UI until it actually matters.
