Clearly everyone should adopt the (East) Berlin standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampelm%C3%A4nnchen

Very visually distinct, walking and standing, and green/red.

Any kind of figure triggers the walk reaction from me (or it did until someone finally clued me in on a trip to Europe).

My working theory had been green figure means cross, red figure means cross with caution, like a flashing red hand in the US.

I find them far less distinct than a walking person and a hand...and if I was colorblind that would be a large problem for me (and colorblindness was the reason for distinguishing the shape in the first place, so makes sense to have very different shapes rather than both "stick figure with hat").

I always assumed the pedestrian light was white to avoid confusion with the green traffic light for parallel drivers.