The icon is not disturbing for me, and I’m sure also not for you. 
But likely for my grandma, she may also inadvertently tap on it and not know what tapping does in the other activity.
There will always be some differences in the personal preferences, thus I don’t think that everybody agreeing on every aspect of a single default would be possible, and it’s thus much more sensible and important to have a set of configuration options that really covers most users.
Preferences also change over time, I for example only changed what I think would be a good “factory” default for the “Email” (contact requests) view. (From show it by default to not show it by default.) This is because of the improvement in (Classic email listening: "start-chat" metrics for classic email client messages (max. length & newlines)) to detect emails that should start a new chat.
With this email-listening in place, I think it could become obsolete for most “default” users to manually check the “Emails” for chat requests or opportunities in deltachat. All one may not even have to know at first then, is, that truly short email messages from known contacts directly open a chat, without much false positives (due to the max. 250 characters with max three newlines condition).