>Those taxes are hard to avoid, but they are bourne by workers/consumers, regardless of who you collect them from (i.e. the economic incidence of a tax is not the same as the legal incidence).
Yes and no. Nominally imposing the tax on the seller or employer is better for the buyer or employee -- it doesn't necessarily mean the seller won't be able to pass the tax on, but it helps. For example, if the employee is making minimum wage, the employer can't reduce their compensation by law, so imposing a labor tax on the employer will force them to eat it because they're not allowed to take it out of the employee's compensation. If the tax was nominally on the employee then it would instead come right out of their minimum wage paycheck. And the same goes for any other mechanism that tends to prevent employers from lowering wages: If you have an employment contract that specifies your compensation, you keep getting paid what you were agreed to be paid even if your employer now has to pay more taxes instead of you. If you have a trade union, the union is going to have a better shot at preventing a wage reduction than demanding raises to counteract a new tax, etc.
In the longer term, as employers have time to hire new employees with new contracts or refuse raises etc., the free market catches up with the tax changes. But that doesn't mean the tax is paid entirely by consumers and employees. If sellers could raise the price of their goods by the amount of a newly imposed VAT without reducing their sales then they would have done it already regardless. When the VAT is imposed industry-wide it allows some cover for price increases, but not by 100% of the tax amount except for in rare cases (such as where the profits in that industry were already legitimately non-existent and passing on the full tax is the only alternative to going out of business). In non-collusive markets the existing players will be fighting to keep prices close to where they were in order to retain as much of their existing sales volume as possible to keep their sunk cost infrastructure utilized, which will require them to eat a sizable chunk of the tax burden.
More to the point, how is that possibly worse than it is now, with international corporations nominally paying a tax on profits but then arranging to not have any profits in jurisdictions where taxes are high, and then subjecting local small businesses to the taxes avoided by their larger competitors?