It’s an interesting design exploration, but it seems without any actual usability testing it’s hard to say that it’s any better of a solution.
Signs ultimately are “learned” behaviors. None of us knew what half of those street signs meant until we went to drivers ed, and in other countries signs often have completely different meanings. Most of us learned that a glowing sign in the window meant something was open at a glance, or we learned it by walking up to a store and pulling on the door to see that it was closed and locked.
One could argue that for something like this, any attempt to improve it will actually make it worse, simply because the legacy is so deeply culturally buried in our thinking. It’s like arguing for the Dvorak vs Qwerty keyboard, despite one being the superior solution we’re going to be stuck this way forever.