Rose tinted glasses.

Xp was almost a nightmare on launch. But got fixed (security not withstanding) switching everyone over from DOS to NT was no simple feat, and there were a lot of issues.

Vista wasn’t great, but the change to drivers made it a nightmare.

7, 8, and 8.1 were fine.

But 10 was a nightmare for the first 5 years. Every other update would break things. And those came out about twice a year.

Windows 11 has been surprisingly issue free for me. 24H2 seems to be the buggiest update since so I’ve been holding back. But I updated to 22 and 23 and I never had any issues, nor did I hear too much complaining. Every major update has some minor issues, and that’s largely why MS staggers their releases.

I’m honestly surprised MS took this long to pause the rollout with how bad it’s been.