I sympathize with people that feel like this makes a big difference in productivity but you would have to be swapping between windows an absurd amount of times in a day for this to make an actual difference in productivity.

It takes (rough estimate) about an extra 200ms to hover the task bar icon and select the window you want.

So you lose a minute of time for every 300 times you do it. Doesn't add up to much unless you are switching windows hundreds or thousands of times a day.

Not to mention the fact that selecting icons from your taskbar isn't even the most efficient way of switching windows, which would be win+number or alt+tab.

Glad you don't need it, but perhaps don't tell others they don't.

Why not? I am not contesting that people like the feature, just contesting that it makes you measurably more productive.

I like how I can move the text cursor around on my iPhone by holding the spacebar down but if they removed that feature I am not going to be measurably less productive.

Not sure that's true in the setup under discussion: win+# requires figuring out which number to press - and if the count is wrong, I mind even end up on an entirely different desktop via some apps I keep pinned on the taskbar. And at the very least subjectively, alt-tab feels rather jarring and requires some mental re-adjustment before I find the proper window to click.

For pinned stuff you eventually remember the number for each app and switch quickly.