> windows 11 isn’t essentially different

That's only if you ignore all of the differences! 8)

There are many big and small differences that people just gloss over, because they feel it doesn't apply to them, or they don't even realise it's there.

Windows 95 used to crash if you looked at it wrong. It was horrendously vulnerable to malware, even across the network. Its "maximums" were hilariously low due to many remaining 16-bit internals. Programming for it was a PITA, even in 32-bit mode. Its network capabilities were woeful. Multilingual? Yes, but only in some combinations at a time. No hope of mixing, say, Chinese and Hebrew in a single text box. Poor text input in general, poor accessibility, etc, etc, etc...