Pinning multiple apps at once? Subfolders? Folders with 1 item only?

Oooof, where to begin. Coming from 10 and open-shell the post title encompasses the biggest issues I'm having with the new start menu. I had everything in folders, many containing subfolders and it all functioned as a very organized tree of my applications.

now with 11 im finding anything in subfolders is merged into the root folder. aka my "games" folder has under it the following folders "steam, standard, virtual reality, launchers, emulators, frontends" which all held their corresponding shortcuts. in all apps view this results in a singular games folder with a huge mishmash/hodgepodge of all of those shortcuts.

so instead i decided that this go around i would hide the custom games folder i created in %programdata% and simply pin everything while letting the all apps view function like it does out of the box instead of micro managing my way through all the years ill be using 11. unfortunately this leads to more caveats.

for one i cannot create subfolders, only folders. so my "one" games folder (readin) would have to be split up into 5 separate pinned folders. I realize this is likely unsolvable without a third party menu at best, or microsofts intervention.

then i started looking at the huge amount of shortcuts i'd be pinning. my games folder has about 50 so i went into explorer, selected them all, right clicked and "pin to start" which resulted in only the entry i right clicked on being added regardless of having multiple selected. am i forced to do this one by one then?

the final piece im trying to resolve which would at least allow me to know where i stand concession wise (before i determine if im simply going to have to use a third party start menu) is the requirement that folders have more than 1 entry.

I can only create a folder if it has something else present. I keep EVERYTHING in folders but I dont want to arbitrarily go and grab something I don't need at this point in time just to create a folder. I thought id be able to create one by moving any shortcut inside and then simply removing the one that served its purpose. wrong, it takes the folder with it

am i missing something/is there a way to make this happen or am i stuck? I havent tested the idea of creating a dummy shortcut then setting it to hidden because thats an absolutely absurd amount of work for something so simple that was doable just fine up until the version of windows after the "last version of windows" but im sure that will nix the folder too.