I've heard the pattern phrased:

95 Good, 98 Bad, 98 SE Good, ME Bad, XP Good, Vista Bad, 7 Good, 8 Bad, 10 Good.

Counting 98 SE as a separate release does seem like cherry-picking in order to make the pattern work. Then again, you could also say the cycle started with Windows 98 (putting the whole of that release into the good pile), and you'd still have a remarkably consistent pattern across two decades and seven versions of Windows. Honestly makes you wonder if there's some deeper cause related to Microsoft's organizational structure or something.

Some things about Win95 are lost to nostalgia, as well. Like broken drivers, esp. in concert with up-to-date office, which came with issues of its own, like broken export formats. (It took more than a year for serious support for Postscript printers, etc.) Win95 became only somewhat functional with Windows 95B. (This one, however, started the IE integration.)

ME was all the features that eventually went into XP but still based on the Windows 98 kernel instead of NT.

What made XP great was how reliable it was compared to previous Windows versions.

I had the one PC in that era that WinME was smooth sailing on. It was a Packard Bell with a 200mhz Pentium 1 (96 mb of ram at the time, i think). For whatever reason, and combination of hardware, ME had no issues running. I had less blue screens on it, and overall found it to be enjoyable and much more stable than 98 and 95c was on that machine.

It wasn't supposed to be an extensive list, plenty of versions are missing, like NT 4 and well, every single version before 95 :)

There’s also Windows 2000, which I think was the worst of all.