Yeah, basically all the useful Win10 start features were removed. Typing a few characters to hit enter and launch a program is also massively slower in Win11, which is bizarre and definitely degrading something that wasn't broken. Microsoft also killed right clicking on a start menu icon to pick from a recent list of files to open, too. Again not broken and didn't need fixing.
Ungroup remains unavailable on the taskbar, yet another breaking of something that wasn't broken and hugely asked for fix that Microsoft's doubled down on ignoring. People who put the taskbar left, right, or top can't do that in 11. Which, last I checked, was the single most requested Win11 fix in Microsoft's Feedback Hub. But Microsoft execs went on record to say they weren't going to do anything about it because other work was higher priority. Not cool, particularly for a company that had
US$ 70 billion available to fix it last year.
It's not the desktop per se, but there are similar regressions in the File Explorer menus. I'd consider those part of the core use we're talking about and yet another example of how Win11 makes something that was easy unnecessarily more time consuming and harder to do. Would barely matter if it was a one off task but this is routine stuff like renaming files.
As far as I know it's mostly linked to internal political battles within Windows client. Not sure why they don't get
nuked from orbit CEO level. In this case it seems what happened is the Win10X team got their incomplete and obviously problematic rewrite of the Win10 taskbar shipped in Win11. There's some good engineering fundamentals underneath that but Win11 seems pretty obviously a rush job.
The app thing Win8 started and consequent split in Microsoft's user interface APIs that developers program against and users experience is apparently the result of another Windows political influence battle.