I don't think it's a macOS ripoff, they would've also ripped off more of the dock if that was the goal. For instance, you would've been able to do things like "pin the task bar to the side".

I think they wanted the start menu to be front and center. And honestly, that just sounds like a good idea, because it is where you go to do stuff that's not on your desktop already. But clicking a button in the bottom left and having the menu open in the middle would look weird, so centering the icons would make sense.

I think there are better ways to do it and I'm sure they've been tried, but they would probably confuse existing Windows users even more.