Would a picture of an ordinary axe be inuitively assoicated with the word 鉞 (yuè)
Edit:
After some discussion on the original thread, my conclusion is &quot;one of the graphic meant to be printed on the Swedish version of that toy was mistakenly printed on the English version instead.&quot;

My original answer is as below:

Would someone speaking Chinese intuitively associate this picture of an axe with the word 鉞?

The answer is no, we wouldn't

Would it make sense to use this picture to illustrate the letter Y in a series of pictures illustrating pinyin?

They are not pictures that illustrate pinyin; The pictures are there as  visual aid to help children to remember English alphabet more easily.
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There have to be a mistake somewhere --  Q-Queen, W-worm,  N-Nail pairings make sense, but 'Y' and 'Axe' pair doesn't, because the word Axe doesn't begin with Y.
I think the original design was [X-aXe].
The point of this design was to match an alphabet with an easily remembered common word, thus help children to better remember the English alphabet; since there is no common word begin with the alphabet X, the designer made an exception and paired Axe with X, because the pronunciation of Axe is similar to X.
There are two rules in choosing a word to match an alphabet in this design. 1. the word has to begin with the same alphabet. 2. the word has to be common enough for kids to remember. The designer couldn't follow both rules for the alphabet X and decided rule #2 is more important because this is a design for helping kids to remember alphabets.
Although the word 'axe' doesn't begin with 'X', but 'axe' does contains 'X' and it is the prominent alphabet in the word.
The handle of the axe is supposedly the missing lower left part of the alphabet X, which should be painted green to complete the alphabet.
It was either the designer's idea, thinking people would get the idea that the missing part of X was replaced by the axe's handle. Or it was a production error that painted the axe handle with different color.
I am a retired graphic designer.