TBF - It still does "just work," The fact that it doesn't completely fit into your (and my) preferences doesn't really change that, and if that's the standard, then everything will fall short of it.
It doesn’t just work though - icons are hidden from users, with no way of users knowing they are hidden.
macOS is still better than windows, but my feeling is it’s more of a glass of cheap warm whiskey in hell than a cool glass of ice water.
If the icons are just hidden and you can't find them in order to use the programs you have running, that's not "just working". That's broken functionality. Windows has solved this with the overflow menu for literally decades.