The worst mistake was removing the ability to ungroup taskbar items! Opening more than one instance of an application is a terrible experience right now. The icons are often unresponsive, the indicator that something is open is literally just a tiny dot.

Instead of addressing this I feel like Microsoft is just going to continue to add tabs to all their applications as justification for it. Edge, VS Code, Windows Terminal, and now File Explorer.

Some Windows 11 GUI customization tools:

Start All Back https://www.startallback.com

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

Open Shell https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu