One annoying thing (among others) I realized after upgrading to Windows 11 recently is the ability to position the taskbar on the right or left is gone. Microsoft and its all knowing Windows 11 team decided that having the taskbar anywhere except at the bottom doesn’t work well and removed this positioning feature that has existed for decades.

I doubt that PowerToys would add a feature for this, but it’d be cool if it happened.

For that, use ExplorerPatcher: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

Agreed. Possibly controversial opinion but in my mind, on widescreen displays, it makes good sense to have the taskbar to the left or right.

I honestly don't get what the technical reason is. Surely no one is hardcoding pixel offsets somewhere. The rendering code likely doesn't care where it starts to render the taskbar and where the main display renders. It can obviously also be rendered without a taskbar below. The most effort is probably incorporating it into settings, but this is hopefully also not hardcoded. This all sounds like something a single employee could implement in one afternoon.

They didn't remove it. The new taskbar and start menu were written for Windows 10x (a sandboxed version of windows meant for dual screen devices) when that was canceled Microsoft bolted them on top of Windows 10 added arbitrary hardware restrictions and released as Windows 11

Windhawk has a plug-in to fix this I'm pretty sure.