I use it the same way I use Spotlight on mac and gnome-do on Ubuntu. I press a key-combo and it gives me a prompt to start typing a few characters that'll probably take me to what I'm looking for.

I can't stand the Windows 10 Start Menu. I paid 5 bucks for Start10 [1], although some people like the free Classic Shell [2].

[1] http://www.stardock.com/products/start10/ [2] http://www.classicshell.net/

To me it seems like you're mostly supposed to use Cortana search. They've taken the same approach as macOS and Ubuntu it seems.

I unpinned everything, and just operate it entirely by keyboard: hit the windows key, type the first few characters of the program name, hit enter. I find I don't even need to look at it most of the time.

you're supposed to pin your most used apps as tiles