I don't think that's inconsistent.

I've seen a right-pointing magnifying glass printed in a book, and a left-pointing one would be equivalent for Arabic or Hebrew. I'd expect to see it in a school science book, for example.

And as others have already mentioned, I've seen the external link printed in several manuals for various products I've bought.

Search Google Books for “external link icon” and you will find several web design books that describe and depict the icon.

And that's the real result of this, people will just settle on a collective commandeering of the closest symbol, making the decision irrelevant and retrospectively worse than pointless.

Annoy everyone enough, and we can redefine the nunicode codepoints as rationals and hand the denominator to another group.