WPF (and whatever they've taken to calling the UWP version of it now) is a little more modern, and it's what I was initially leaning towards, but also doesn't seem to be moving much and it feels like the future is very unclear, while even MS themselves have started putting out Electron apps. It really doesn't breed confidence.
WinUI is the future, but they’ve admitted it will be years before it reaches the maturity of UWP, which is embarrassingly bad even 5 years on.
WPF, in my opinion, is the best choice for “native” windows apps. The actual best choice is Electron, as most teams doing new work at MS have noticed.
WPF, for native, hits the sweet spot of supporting newer technology (high DPI), having decent performance, and being well implemented; it has been solid for at least 10 years now. Also easy to style and theme, similar in concept to web, but just more annoying.
The migration wizard for .NET apps was a CLI script, really? In the land of "Developers, Developers,.." and GUI wizards.
Maybe if enough of us keep doubling down on Forms/WPF/Win32 and ignore the whole WinUI/Reunion reboot, they finally understand want we really want for desktop Windows.
The future could be MAUI though; and it is around the corner
Myself, I'd just build some command line script that hit up a database and pipe data to build a GNUPlot script and just generate a PDF report. That seems to be the best way to hook into a well maintained GUI project. It isn't sexy, but it's dead simple, should last forever, and be very simple to port to a different OS or language in a single afternoon.
WinForms is alive. And will be for some time.