After upgrading to the VLC 3.0.0 rc2 and rc4 Debian packages (Debian/unstable) from 2.2.8, the icons in the left pane of the Playlist View became large compared to their associated text, i.e. the icon/font size ratio is much larger than the usual one. Here's a snapshot from my Debian bug report:
This looks a bit strange and the items take more space than necessary, so that I doubt this is intentional. In case this matters, the Xft.dpi value is 132 on this machine. The problem persists after removing my VLC config.