Good observation, though Microsoft forgot it (again) when they designed Windows 11 and moved the Start button from the bottom-left corner to somewhere in the middle of the screen.
It's movable of course, but this is still a downgrade from win10. My biggest peeve is that there seems to be no option anymore to not-condense icons, and you can't change the notification color (when an app flashes its icon).
I miss notifications on my work computer all the time because the flash color just doesn't stand out very much with my dark theme, and I can't even expand the width because...well it feels like they released an unfinished and unpolished product, again.
I hate that there's trade-offs that shouldn't need to exist with every new version.
Meanwhile my mac I don't think has ever lost functionality or customizability in the last..8ish years I've been using it as my daily driver.
edit: caveat...this is a work computer and obviously has group policies/etc that might affect things. I will correct this post if I'm wrong :)
Yes, I'm not trying to defend their modern design (in)sensibilities. :P I switched from Windows to Linux (with an aborted attempt at Mac) after realizing the OS-level ads weren't going anywhere.
