>> I had assumed this was ubiquitously understood, but clearly not.
Some anecdotal evidence to support this.
I work for a very large health care company. We recently redesigned one of our portals. During the UX research phase, one of the tasks was to go back to the home page via the logo - one of the researchers had an idea we were assuming all of our users should/would know this since but we still have a large portion of our users are older, retirees or aging Gen Xers. It was a hunch at the time - nothing more.
The research showed a large enough percentage of people couldn't complete the task in a timely manner whereas on the new design, the logo is now just an SVG, with no link. We have a dedicated "Home" link now on the main navigation which in testing, 100% of the people were now able to complete the task in a timely manner.
I think it really stunned quite a few people since this has seemingly been a standard design pattern for so long. I was pretty stunned hearing the research team talking about it.
