Is it really necessary to bother about where to prescribe icons?

Question

css

Hello!
Such situation.
According to can i use statistics, 5.35% of users use opera mobile 8, I think this percentage is more than the statistical error (for example, 2-3% still didn’t go anywhere)
Now I insert icons through pseudo-elements, setting them backround-size.
But this opera does not support background size and everything is falling apart.
Then it remains to embed img/svg in html instead of the correct practice to separate images in css background.
1) Will it be a mistake?
And in general, I often insert icons directly through img tags (for png etc) or svg tags, since it is convenient to manage them, there is no need to create a separate class in some cases.
2) There is also an idea to generate font files from svg. And then insert icons like font awesome does through some empty i tag. Is this a good practice, given that empty tags are not semantically important?

Answer 1

2) This is completely normal. When laying out, it is impossible to do without empty tags at all.