I’m still looking for a perfect filebrowser, nautilus is good I wish I could use it, but nautilus has so many dependencies that I always give up installing.
I tried thunar in a docker image (it is here if you want to use it), but you know we don’t get many integrations in this way.
This “missing icons” problem happens only when there is no icons in your system (which is a rare case) or when your system is not configured properly.
Install it using apt-get install ICON-THEME or pacman -S ICON-THEME.