Worth noting that these buttons offer a search function – which could be nice if you have a ton of categories or tags:
(I left the buttons alone, and hid the tag section from the side menu. It either gets long and unwieldy, or you have to specify which default tags to show, and I didn’t want to play favorites 
)
CSS
// suppress tag list from sidebar to simplify appearance
.sidebar-section[data-section-name="tags"] {
display: none
}