ah @tatsujb .. did I mention I got a reply to my question "will the strat icons ever be reworked" while I was on twitch on the daylong livestreams? the answer was short but encouraging "YES"
Found out another bit about the icon rendering. I suspect that it renders the Coherent UI Scene once, and then draws that surface multiple times. So as far as Coherent is concerned, it's only highlighting one element when you hover over it in the elements panel, but the game is repeating the rendered bits.