Nowadays, there are these convenient icons in ModelBuilder. However, their meaning is not always clear to me. Is there perhaps a poster or some other resource in which all the symbols are clearly explained?
I found the link below, but the images are not very clear.
We will update the doc to add some resources related to icons, but this can be an exhaustive list as things get added release by release. However as a general rule, the icons on variable usually represent the data type of the variable and type of tool (system/modelbuilder specific tools such as iterators/utilities/logical/ or script tools. Hope this helps a little.