>This may have been fixed in recent versions where they finally added the ability to change the taskbar grouping in the settings, but I haven't felt the need to test it.

THANK YOU. I never heard about this, I had completely given up on using the taskbar for anything except the system tray.

I agree to the rest of your points -- I only use the start menu to search for stuff now. The pinned icons take up way too much space and even though I spent some time carefully curating them I never seem to want to use them.

You didn't mention the system tray, but I want to add that the redesign also made it worse than in Win10. The volume, battery, wifi, etc icons are joined into one button but actually if you right click they are three different buttons still. This is awful design, the fact that you have different options depending on where you right click is not communicated at all.