How do I get back the unread counter badge in Android 8 (Oreo)?

[Android Central Question]

On my Samsung Galaxy S8 (and previous S5, S3) I've always has a badge with a count of unread messages in WhatsApp, Email, SMS, and some other apps.
Now with the Android 8 (Oreo) upgrade these are gone in favor of 'notification dots', which I find completely useless!
I was actually hoping the counter could be extended to e.g. Yahoo and GMail apps. This seems to be going backwards to me...
While I can turn the dots of, I have not found a way to get the numbers back. A Google search suggests some 3rd party apps, but there read & count your notifications, which does not reflect the number of unread messages/e-mails, especially if you DO NOT WANT notifications, because you can see if there are messages (and how many) on the badge! Argh..
Does anyone have a good solution for this? Am I missing a trick?
Why-oh-why is this not built into Android, Google!!!

 

[hallux]

Why-oh-why is this not built into Android, Google!!!

Actually - what your are seeing IS the initial implementation of this by Google. It seems Samsung decided that rather than re-invent the wheel to code their own notification badges (or adapt the code from previous versions to Oreo) they would just use what was built into the OS for this.

For me - this works. I'm not a "zero inbox" person, and I don't open every email or mark them as read if I was able to "preview" the entire thing, so total unread count is worthless to me and the dots are useful.

 

[EsElle]

I would also like the numbers to stay there permanently. So far I've tried clearing the cache partition and allowing Samsung Home Experience in notifications special access, as suggested by another site, and neither have worked.