I think that overall it's an improvement but you have to see it from the perspective of Microsoft. They have roughly 1,400,000,000 users. Without this change, right click copy, paste, etc appears in some random spot on the screen which means an inconsistent move of the mouse often a long way from the point clicked. The more frequently it's done, the more time is lost. I know. Fractions of seconds. But the daily loss in productivity over that many users is enormous.
If used frequently, it quickly becomes second nature. If not, it takes a small amount of adjustment before becoming second nature. But overall, now time saved will be much greater than the time lost adjusting.
Consider it from the perspective of somebody who hasn't used Windows before. If that was the case, I think it's pretty clear that this is preferable. It's always going to be at the same spot a couple of inches to the side of where you right click And normally on the right unless you're so far against the right side of the screen that it has to go to the left. And it uses an icon instead of words that have to be read.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a Microsoft fanboy. I'm over 50 years old and I've been using Windows since they rolled out Windows 3.1. In my opinion They should have begun this with the launch of Windows 10. It should have been defaulted to the off position with a registry edit to turn it on so they could work all the bugs out. They should have been pushing software makers for the last several years to support it so that by now most if not all third party manufacturers or software would already support it. Then by the time 11 rolled out, It would have been complete. At that point they should have provided a setting to activate it and promoted it so that people knew about it. Then people could easily adopt it based on whether or not they wanted to.
So I do agree that they dropped the ball on it and by providing a registry edit instead of a settings option to change it, it complicated things for those who have no desire to change to it. So It definitely could have been handled better.