Task bar in the middle would be a miserable experience. You now how you hate when you go to press a link on a page with not fully loaded ad, and then ad loads and you click on an ad instead of a link? They took that principle and applied it to the OS. Imagine you go for a start button, but some application showed an error dialog or some hing like that, and as you click, you miss and launch whatever is next to the start. Also forget your muscle memory, you need to hunt controls, since they move around all the time.
Also, if I understand correctly there is no longer a way to display window title on the task bar, so if you have 5 PDFs open, you get to see 5 identical icons and then you need to guess which one is which. Even though your monitor is super wide and there is no need to save space by compressing stuff.
I'm so glad I use Linux at home, and I hope that by the time W11 rolls out in corporate environment there is some third-party shell that can be used to undo all their "innovations".
Ctrl-Shift-Esc is the shortcut for the task manager, which I hope still works in W11. But yeah, from what I heard most of the right button stuff is not there. I guess it is a continuation of the thing where they fail to make tablet UI work on desktop.