Re: it's the GUI, stupid
"Have you ever considered the possibility that the new system is actually more logical, "
Sure... having a mobile-oriented Settings "app" on a desktop PC that has some of the settings in it, with the rest of them being in the desktop-oriented Control Panel, is *perfectly* logical. Having a half and half UI that is equally unfit for mobiles (which MS abandoned years ago, though you would never know it from their UI!) and for desktops, rather than one designed specifically for the platform upon which it is used, is the height of logic.
Having the thing full of ads, telemetry that can't be fully turned off (even on enterprise editions, where it still blabs about things MS considers "security" issues), and updates you can't control all that much are icing on the cake.
It used to be that when you plugged in a new device for which it does not have a driver, Windows would search for one on the spot from Windows Update if you asked it to. Now it just sends you to Windows Update, where you may or may not get a driver you need, and oh yes, while waiting to see, let's just go ahead and install every other update MS wants you to have too. Hope you weren't planning on using that new thing anytime in the immediate future!
Windows 10 did not start as crap and end up good. It started as crap, is crap now, and will go EOL as crap. Windows 11 started as even crappier, and it will end as crap too. It's Microsoft policy... Windows is crap, by design, and people will use it because MS spent 30 years trying to make sure they have no other choice.
Windows 9x would not work for modern workloads not because its GUI is inadequate, but because the kernel level stuff is a quarter century out of date. The GUI is perfectly fine... it would have evolved over time as the technical underpinnings did the same, but the basic paradigm would be the same.
I have my current desktop set up pretty much as it was with XP. From the moment I first ran XP to the last eleven years on, I had the theming service disabled and the 95-style cascading menu enabled, returning the appearance to Win2k.
My daily driver desktop is more like Win2k than it is like the Win 10 desktop. It has menu bars, title bars, status bars, no ribbon, and a denser layout than the touch oriented bits of 10. The application ("Start") menu has cascading flyouts for the various categories, very much like the one in 95/2k. The System Settings menu is a dead ringer for the old Control Panel, and there is no additional settings "app." It's what the classic UI would have evolved into if MS did not try to reinvent the wheel every so often (the current iteration of which being square like the wheels on a Canadian car in South Park). And it's far and away better than anything Microsoft has made in the last decade.