I don’t hate it, the way most people do, but you’re right. Windows 11 is a stop gap between Windows 7 and Windows 12. All the versions in between have been.

WinUI 3 is the realization of a lot of work unifying the platform, and providing a path forward for big enterprise software to migrate slowly (as enterprise does).

The underlying OS has changed relatively little, but it’s taken years and probably hundreds of thousands of man hours to break up 30 years of monolithic code, the way they have - so that the UI is no longer dependent on the version of Windows.