No 7 sucked too. It just came off the back of Vista which was a real hot mess, so 7 appeared better.
The thing is, Microsoft has always had an adversarial (or abusive) relationship with its customers, forcing things on them that most of them don’t want. Like active desktop and IE integration in Windows 9x, “activation” and Fisher Price UI in XP, bloated (for the time) Aero UI that required a 3D capable GPU in Vista, UAC in Vista, forced automatic updates in 7, abandoning the start menu in favor of that awful tile UI in 8.x, telemetry you can’t disable in 10, a start menu that acts more like an app store and advertising place in 10, forced TPM and Microsoft accounts in 11 … the list is endless. And then when they back down on one thing, people are like: “Hurray, the czar heard us! Windows is actually good now!” … forgetting all the other things they have been forced to swallow in the past.