More than likely, the majority of your eye's focus is spent in the top half of your screen, for me having the start bar at the top is very natural. If you haven't, I'd give it a try. Having said that, user choice is sacrosanct.
There's nothing interesting on the taskbar, so it makes sense to keep it down there. The most commonly used programs like Firefox, IDE, Slack are pinned to the taskbar, so I can invoke them with Win+[1-3]. When multitasking in full screen, there's Alt+Tab. Overall, I feel like the taskbar doesn't have that much use most of the time, but it's nice to have it on the screen just so I can use it as "shortcut cheatsheet".