I mean, I used `tin` as my newsreader until somewhere between 2010-2015. It wasn't quite a hellscape of unusability if one was using a text only client.
There were some good GUI newsreaders but Outlook Express was a shit show. I remember OE was what my ISP had NNTP documentation for and nothing else.
Thunderbird didn't come out until the early 2000s. The predecessors were Mozilla mail & news and Netscape Communicator. Seamonkey[1] is an offshoot of the former once Mozilla split mail and news into Firefox and Thunderbird.
The main problem OE had was the quote wrapping problem that other clients didn't. The other was that it defaulted to top posting IIRC.