After saying that, I noticed on my wiki that rarely the "small" variety actually does use the custom image icons. And after extensive investigation, I have determined that no code actually exists to prevent this, so it may be by design that custom images do display in the small variety. Rather, my memory of :not(.vw-icon-small) CSS rules was actually in relation to something else (like not putting borders around tiny fonts), and the fact that my main experience of this variety is through the Recent Activity widget, may have contributed to my thinking on this issue.
The Recent Activity widget seems to omit code related to loading any custom CSS rules. Even not considering custom image icons, this is a problem, because some activity may use a custom font icon, and those rules would need to be loaded or there is obviously a bug that the widget is using the wrong icon for those items. When the code is added in for this, the custom image icons start loading there too. This aspect should be fixed in the next release.