Its decades of abstraction hell.
In college, we learned about how old certain systems were inside Windows XP. And already, that was getting pretty thick! So when I hear things like Win10 has x feature all that way from Win95, I mentally scream.
To be fair to Microsoft (I can’t believe I actually typed that) it’s not something they can just fix without splitting Windows into a consumer and business SKU that is significantly different from current Windows. Currently the only real difference is the amount of control the end user has over the platform, but the features are pretty much the same. To make a fully “modern” version you would basically have to build Windows from the ground up to eliminate all the cruft. There is no money for Microsoft in that. Better to focus on business and let the consumer complain.
The thing is at this point with all the effort Microsoft has been putting into making Windows more linux like they could literally make future versions of windows a new Linux distribution and heavily invest in improving wine/proton to run legacy windows applications. That eliminates all those decades of ancient Windows code and keeps compatibility.
