Menu widget item icon doesn't support img tag

[Shifrin]

What steps will reproduce the problem?

I'm trying to create a menu using Yiisoft\Yii\Widgets\Menu widget, but my goal is to use svg image as icon which requires a img tag instead of i tag. Which seems not possible because of i tag explicitly used in the Yiisoft\Yii\Widgets\Helper\Normalizer::menu().

I tried to create the img tag in a following way, but it didn't work as expected.

[
    'label'     => 'Dashboard',
    'link'      => administration_url('dashboard/index'),
    'iconAttributes' => [
        'tagName' => 'img',
        'src' => 'icon-url',
        'alt' => 'Dahsbaord'
    ]
]

Please note that the widgets I'm trying to use in a Yii2 application.

What is the expected result?

<img src="icon-url" alt="Dashbaord"/>

What do you get instead?

<i src="icon-url" alt="Dashbaord"></i>

Additional info

Q	A
Version	^2.1
PHP version	8.3
Operating system	php:8.3-fpm-alpine

[Shifrin]

BTW I could able to achieve it in the following way, but I have to disable the encoding for the label.

[
    'label' => sprintf(
                '<img src="%s" class="%s" alt="%s"><span>Dashboard</span>',
                url($this->assetsBaseUrl . '/icons/dashboard.svg'),
                'uk-margin-small-bottom',
                'Dashboard'
    ),
    'encode' => false,
]