alt Hacker NewsThis is the correct answer. Win2k was probably the most solid and cruft-free release that they did.
Then the enshittification started with Window XP, jelly-mold/curved glass buttons, activation, and .NET everywhere, followed by the disaster that was Vista.
They released Windows 7, and somehow then decided, yet again, to screw things up with Windows 8 because 'mobile'.
If only .NET was actually everywhere like Swift on Apple, or Java/Kotlin on Google land.
Instead we keep having COM with shitty tooling for the relevance it has on the OS API surface, especially since Vista.