I always hear this repeated but I feel like it doesn't hold up. Most Windows releases are bad these days. Last release that was mostly decent was Windows 7 but they were even fucking that up towards the end with 'telemetry'.
Didn't they say that they were planning to no longer release new "versions" per se, but just keep on updating the existing operating system indefinitely? Perhaps they had the bad luck to start that strategy with one of the bad releases.
I think they also throttled gpu performance at the kernel level or something. I vaguely remember reading a post about that but don't have source or anything. However back in the day I was getting dogshit framerates in VR and I had a "pretty good" computer. After trying everything to solve these performance issues for months and failing, I tried out Windows 10 and suddenly all my framerate problems were solved.