Comment by bonesss

What I find missing, compared to back-in-the-day, is the _maturity_ of that ecosystem.

Win32 has warts on warts, but around the year 2000 the MS development space was a monoculture and the COM-to-GUI story was increasingly mature and integrated.

.Net came along and, on the one hand, positioned MS to be a whole different kind of tool provider (F# on dotnet core on linux in kuberernetes is niiiiice), but they also lost a few hundred man-years worth of local improvements to their platform. This without providing a credible replacement for Win32 ensuring it would be around for decades.

That fracture fractured again with XAML, again losing tons of maturity, and then fractured even further with the UWP/Silverlight/Metro/WhoKnows. I've never been a bigger fan of MS's product line, but can't justify or defend using much on the client other than html for fancy things or standard winforms for deployability.