Why didn’t anyone tell me about this method yet???
Traced a number of icons but simplify path was either doing waaaaaaaaaay too much simplifying, nothing, or adding extra nodes.
Well, warp can do a similar thing but limited to a brush size area similar to selecting an area of nodes and simplify. Just so much faster. A number of other ways to do it listed here too. Don’t know if it still works this was for the newer versions but i have an old one and this link is 2014.