> data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently

This is literally the shitshow that's post-Ribbon Microsoft UX in a nutshell.

In the 90s, they designed a logical ontology, then mapped every item somewhere into that.

Post-Ribbon, they pulled whatever happened to be most-commonly used in, and then everything else got stuffed in a jumbled junk drawer (because who uses that?).

What seems to have been lost in the move from one to the other is anyone at Microsoft giving a goddamn 2 seconds of thought, minimum, to EVERY item in the OS.

And because that thought was never given, you get wildly broken edge cases and odd settings, simply because it wasn't anyone's job to make sure everything had a place.

Ribbonification (aka polish the 80% and fuck the 20%) isn't bad for users: it's bad because it lets Microsoft be lazy about organizing.