[commandar]

>It also eats vertical space with those huge icons, which is precious given the current popular screen dimensions.

This is one Windows gets wrong too, in fairness.

W11 killed the ability to move the taskbar to the left/right side of the screen. That's a real pain on ultrawide displays where you have absolutely miles of horizontal real estate and relatively limited vertical space.

Fortunately, ExplorerPatcher exists and can restore the functionality.

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/