The kicker menu has a pixelated icon when using a custom image. Kickoff does not. Difference is that Kickoff saves custom paths without file:// Kicker with. IconItem has different behaviour if the source (which is a string not a URL) starts wtih file:// or not. Weirdly the broken behaviour is when we do. Obviously real bug here is in IconItem, not Kicker.
Can confirm this bug - Kicker icon looks pixelated when main Panel's height is greater than default - app-menu-looks-pixelated screenshot.
Created attachment 107510 [details] app-menu-looks-pixelated
This will get addressed by https://phabricator.kde.org/D7469
Patch got pushed as b46cd1ed167c.