The taskbar change is a symbolic thing. The company that spent decades pushing "we don't break the customer's workflow" has decided that's no longer a high priority.
They are playing at a unique scale: even a "narrow interest" feature with .1% take rate is millions of people they snub if they break it. That's a huge responsibility and they used to be very good and respecting it.
The fact they backpedaled some of the changes shows that it wasn't actually a difficult technical limitation, or necessary to enable some new vision. So we can either give them the benefit of the doubt and say they lacked the resources to prioritize these features (on a trillion dollar company?) or we can figure it's a mindset of "if we break people's existing workflow, it steers them into something we prefer" (see, any excuse they can find to monkey with people's default browsers and home pages).
My work sent me a Win11 laptop. I dislike it because of an obvious trifling thing (I miss being able to click on the clock and get a pop-up month calendar), but there are other nuisances:
* Rounded window corners. I don't know who is begging for them, because it's the trend in several newer Wayland desktops, MacOS, and now Win11. It might work well with exclusively new software designed assuming there are keep-out areas, but right now we still have the occasional legacy program with some trim in the corner that's being unceremoniously cut off. This seems like something that would be a themable option, but the ability to style Windows with built-in tools seems to have peaked years ago and is crumbling with every new version. The overall look just felt off, like someone was trying to convince their elderly Grandma that a KDE desktop with Firefox was the Windows XP + IE6 he was used to.
* The constant unasked-for changes. This last week, my machine started displaying a bunch of weather and sports boxes on the lock-screen. I didn't ask for that. I assume it's an extension of the earlier "let's put a bunch of random dialog on the lock screen about the random wallpaper, which happened to of course link back to Bing" feature I didn't ask for. I don't know how to be rid of it offhand, and can't be bothered trying to find out. (It's a work machine, so I'm not going to put that much effort into making it 'mine'.) But I shouldn't have to be going in and making changes to keep the machine I use for work purposes in a predictable steady state (modulo security fixes).