My pleasure, John.
But I have to clarify again — it’s not the real solution to the topic of the report (which should be converted into a request).

See, without any of two Align to Glyph Bounds options checked Ai will align them using their 'Em Boxes', that it with the space for ascenders, descenders, side-bearings. The distribution and alignment worked in my example because these lines had the same font size.
If you make one type object larger — it won’t work like I demoed anymore, since 'boxes' are now of different sizes!

(the apps I use to record GIFs are www.cockos.com/licecap/ and blog.bahraniapps.com/gifcam/ — not an ad, just wanted to share)

Egor, thank you for the .gif (cool way to demo, by the way). I did not understand the technique. It does work for me. Thanks again, I can't tell you how much this helps me!

@John, @C, I can’t say it does not work for me.
On the contrary, the text objects (with or without prominent descenders) gets aligned and distributed as I expect them too.
Can you please record the way it works for you and compare with my GIFs below. Am I getting this wrong?

agree with C below, this still doesn't work. Win 11, Illustrator 27.4
Please understand how seriously this impacts my work. I am a (hardware) keyboard designer. I absolutely need to be able to have a group of text boxes spread horizontally across the artboard, line up so all of their baselines are on a precise line. Having to do this with smart guides, etc... is so hard, compared to how it used to work: select all, shift+select to set one as target, then align all. Please, please help us here!

OSX 13.0.1
Illustrator 27.1.1

JAN 23: still an issue. Align to Glyph only works if you are dragging an individual selection relative to another. If you select multiple text items and use any Align tool, the same wrong results. The Align tools ignore the Align to Glyph settings.

Jakob, can you check the state of new Align to Glyph Bounds in the Align panel’s menu? Is it on or off for you?