Fair alternative, but would this not be much less recognizable on the page to a non-native speaker of the default language? What if you have so many locales that a menu or drop down is required? This does not seem to me like it’s a better solution, it just has different downsides.
Depends the kind of website you are looking at. But yes, my personal preference is to use the translation icon (it looks similar to the one used for Google and Apple translate apps), and next to it, the currently selected iso code. Then in the dropdown, as a list, what I mentioned above.
