

I’d say XP was decent for its time, and 7 was kind of a sweet spot of the NT branch too. Before that 9x tended to become unstable (especially 95, and I’ve heard Millenium Edition was awful but I never had it).
Vista, 8, everything since 10, all terrible. Especially since Microsoft has started to push for cloud, AI, live services, automatic translation, total disregard for user settings…
Yeah.
It was certainly pushed on many PCs that had no business trying to run it, especially laptops. But honestly I’ve used both XP and Vista and even on a computer that could run it, I didn’t see anything that justified how much more resources it required.