Please show me a screenshot of this start menu.
Plenty on screenshots of this in the internet. Like i said - start menu has been redesigned in most new versions of windows and it's impossible to please everyone. There are always people complaining about it.
Also task bar with small icons, tightly packed together for space efficiency.
Taskbar is also missing big icons like it did in Win10. Yes it's true that the small icons option is missing in Win11.
As for space efficiency - i have pinned 19 icons on taskbar and from the free space it seems pin 25 more before it's full.
If you need to pin more than 45 icons then you're out of luck at the moment.
I attached 3 screenshots i made from Win10 a while ago showing different icons sizes. The Large icon size can only be enabled with a 3rd party program.
Spacing on explorer text menu's gaps between each line, size of font.
There is compact mode for explorer. Also there was another setting that affects the spacing and that is the view you use. If you use Detailed view than there are no gaps. If you use List view then there are gaps even with Compact setting.
That explains why it doesn't happen to me. I always use the Detail view.
In the Detail and Content views the gaps are non-existent.
In the List and Tiles views, it is already larger and selectable.
With four different icon views, the differences are already quite large.
So if you absolutely want to use the List view, you have to put up with this quirk or use some other file manager.