With this patch:

Side-note, having SVG files in repo would have made this simpler discoverable (diffing).

I don't think so, because these are automatically-flipped icons. Even if we had SVG files in the repo, there would not have been a separate SVG file for the RTL version of the help icon. The SVG files would also not have told you about the special treatment Hebrew and Yiddish get for these icons.

You're mostly right. For some reason I was making up a visual lookup process in my brain towards differently labelled icons on example help.
When going through icon OOUI JSON files the -ltr/-rtl SVGs are assigned to certain language ISO code keys. Then I was sometimes looking up the specific icon in the folder and just visualized it.

In case of more complex ones, where the LTR/RTL icons are not reused, like bold, the SVGs carry the lang code in the file name, like bold-cyrl-te.svg.
This doesn't make the comparison much simpler, but should explain partly my thought process above. Nevertheless, we want to have as lil duplicate icons as files or paths in the document for maintenance and therefore having a dedicated comparison in Storybook for all specific languages is superior solution. :)