Microsoft's new Windows 11 Start menu is bigger and fixes a major pain point

I find the Win 11 start menu pretty bad. It's not as awful as a couple of the other attempts at revamping it, but worse than Win 10. Letting you get rid of the recommended stuff is a step in the right direction. Making it larger is a step in the wrong direction. If there were some way to configure it to be more compact and omit most of the frills, I'd be much happier with it.

Instead, I use stardock to replace it.

A bigger start menu is not really what I would consider to be a major feature request, but maybe that's just me. I want windows to add more customizability options so I can effectively natively restyle the entire PC to look like W7

So much empty space. Does anyone else miss compact, purposeful UI designs?