This has not changed. I got the impression that, given their recommendations not to include banners such as Free and Pro (despite their popularity), Apple's philosophy is that the icons should be symbolic, not text, and that the name of the application (localizable) is displayed anyway, so the icon should not need text.
I agree that this is a pity, although, indeed, you can expect the icons to be localizable. After all, symbols can often be culture specific ... An extreme case would be a hand signal, which can mean friendly greetings in one culture and a very unpleasant thing in another. Even colors have different connotations in different cultures. An often cited example is the color of mourning, which in the West is black and white in some Asian cultures.