New UIs are like shoe stores, with off-white shoes stored in unlabelled off-white shoeboxes. Everything is shuffled around randomly once per quarter, which is exhausting and not understandable.
Why did this happen?
UI/UX people need to make their mark to justify their salary, that's why.
It is poor design by having that be the form of which quick access to settings is provided. The tray icon paradigm simply invites clutter.
The taskbar icons are added by programs that are running. Disabling autorun for them prevents them from starting, and therefore the icons from showing up. I'd say 90% of the time disabling autorun for the companion program doesn't break any functionality.
The Win11 taskbar is like having only a systray with 25 icons in it.
It's no different than building up the option flags in a bash or powershell one liner. It's the direct graphical translation even.
I used to repeat that line too, 25 years ago when I was still on Windows 3.x, but it's gotten a little old since then.