Horizontal notes alignment with lyrics - howto?

Not sure that I'd qualify as having more knowledge than you but I comment and I agree with you. Notes are spaced according to duration (not exactly but aesthetically). Lyrics follow notes. Even if you can't read the notes very well you can still get an idea of timing from the way the lyrics are spaced. I think altering this spacing to make things line up in exact proportion or with same-size gaps between lyrics would likely confuse more singers than it would help.

Indeed, it's completely correct and a fundamental rule of music notation that quarter notes should take more space than eighths. And that non-melisma syllables (e.g, all the syllables in this example) should be centered under the notes. So the alignment is certainly correct, and the spacing follows standard practice as well.

However, that said, there is wiggle room in deciding how much extra space to allow for quarters compared to eighths, and I think the posted example shows MuseScore working a bit too hard to increase the spacing according to the some ratio that would apply without lyrics. When lyrics are present, spacing by necessity gets larger in many cases (eighth notes etc), so it makes sense to reclaim space elsewhere.

Subjectively speaking, I'd personally be OK with reducing the space after the first quarter note in your example a little bit, assuming there isn't something going on in any other staff to prevent this from making sense. It's easier to assist if you attach the actual score instead of just a picture, but assuming all else is normal and as I'm assuming it to be, a way to reduce this space could be to select the measure and reduce stretch, or select the note after the quarter and reduce leading space (in the Inspector). I wouldn't resort to dragging notes; this will mess up the alignment with the lyrics, which is correct now and should stay correct unless things get a lot more crowded.