In regards to the parent comment, one improvement of Fancy Zones is with multiple monitor setups of various resolutions & horizontal/portrait modes.
A few more favorites, there is now a pin window to top of screen so you can keep something always on top of other windows. What is extra nice, is if you use multiple virtual desktops, it stays on the virtual desktop. They've also added some nice mute mic & camera keyboard shortcuts.
The problem with *-tab is that each application has no fixed place in that space. So on every invocation I have to look, find, switch.
Contrast with bringing up Mail using Alfred. The behaviour is always the same, and therefore muscle-memory-learnable: Cmd+space, ma, return. Messages: Cmd+space, me, return. Near-instant for me because I've done it literally thousands of times.
BTW Win+1 to Win+9 will switch to the first 9 pinned items in taskbar. If there isn’t an available window it will open one. I have Outlook pinned as the 4th item on my taskbar so navigating to it is always Win+4.
If I've got Outlook open I don't want another Outlook open. Why would I want that? I want to go to the version of Outlook that I already have running! This renders a 'launcher' pointless. I only 'launch' Outlook once a day.
I've yet to find – and I stopped looking a while back, because I stopped using the OS – a Windows 'application launcher' that does this. If Win+R does this then you've just blown my mind, but I don't think it does.
Is this a result of the way that Windows and Mac treat running apps differently? I only ever have one instance of Safari.app running, for example. That isn't the case on Windows, so how would a 'switcher' know which instance to pick?