You can change it back to left-aligned. It was the first thing I did after upgrading. After that, the only difference on the taskbar is the Windows logo now has a gradient on it whereas in Windows 10 it was just a plain white logo.
As for the text labels the article is complaining about, I know what he's referring to but I haven't used the feature in so many years I can't make myself sympathize. Just get over it. A full-page article about one missing feature, and then tried to generalize it to sound like the whole OS was similarly bad. But only one example was provided to support the generalization. I'm more disappointed in this article than I am with Windows 11.