It's not just the start bar though. There are similar things all over the OS. For example, if you right click a document in Windows 11 one of the most common things you might want to do, "copy" isn't there. Well it is there, but now it's behind this little anonymous looking rectangle icon at the top* of the context menu and is no longer clearly listed as "copy" in the menu.

Maybe I'm just getting old... But I find UIs are just generally getting more confusing and assume more of the user. For example, back buttons on browsers don't say back anymore, but are just an arrow, because everyone knows what that arrow does, right? And that's probably fair, but even still, I like the explicit text label so I know for sure what I'm clicking is what I'm looking for. The three dots for accessing a menu might be a better example as my parents actually do get confused by that

* The icon can also randomly appear at the bottom of the menu because who cares about predictability when designing UIs anymore.