> The Win8/10 taskbar's code predates Avalon (the prototype/codename for WPF), and trying to change/fix it at all usually ended up breaking it. It's one of the few binaries on Windows that would not be recompiled to build a new release image in fear of breaking it.
The taskbar that underwent a major redesign in Windows 7 (released after WPF)? Also, that binary is explorer.exe, surely it got rebuilt quite often for new ads. features, and fixes?
The taskbar exists in its own timeline, apparently. (Ex-)Microsoft engineers working in the UI/UX team for Windows itself have spoken about how much of a nightmare dealing with that thing was.
Also, the taskbar technically exists as a dll, not an exe, explorer.exe would link to it and run it if it was being ran as the UI shell. This is now split out to its own exe (Shell Experience Host iirc), and explorer.exe is now only File Explorer.
Since it exists as a dll, btw, this is how the Win10 taskbar injectors work, they just call the dll (which still ships in Win11) instead of letting Shell Experience Host do the Win11 thing.
The sane way of handling this, btw, is just use Shell Experience Host injectors to get the desired behaviors, such as using Windhawk and use m417z's taskbar height and icon size plugin (the third most popular Windhawk plugin); to match Vista/7 era small, set to height 32, icon size 16, taskbar button width 28.
The detail missing is that those DLLs are COM servers, so it isn't really doing injection rather the standard COM RPC.