What is HEIC?
HEIC is what an iPhone saves photos as, and it is not really an image format so much as a container holding HEVC video frames - the same codec used for film, applied to one still picture. It stores a photo at roughly half the size of the equivalent JPEG, which is why Apple switched to it, and it is also why so little else opens it: HEVC is patent-licensed, so most browsers and a good deal of desktop software cannot read a HEIC at all. Large photos are usually stored cut into tiles that have to be reassembled, not as one picture.
What is ICNS?
ICNS is the macOS icon container - what sits inside an .app bundle. Since Lion it stores its images as ordinary PNGs at a handful of sizes, which is why reading one means picking the biggest member and writing one means rendering several.