> Part of me also thinks the problem might be inter-generational: a lot of Gen-Z programmers will have started-off with the NodeJS ecosystem and I imagine they also have less overall exposure to C/C++ - and probably even less experience with Win32/COM/COM+/DCOM, which is the foundation of Outlook.
My team around 2014 in Microsoft had problems finding people who wanted to learn COM, I think at one point we literally drew straws for who'd have to learn it.
The Office org has plenty of Win32 C++ people, but even there they are outnumbered now days thanks to all the other platforms.
FWIW I spent a year in the Office org, and while the code is impressive in many ways, doing anything in it is very hard. Not necessarily because the code is bad, it is just that it is big, with lots of history and layers, so doing simple things like getting an image passed around through various parts of the code means jumping through lots of hoops.
The other issue is that now days Windows programming skills are basically non-transferable. It used to be everything ran on Windows, so if you spent some time at Microsoft learning the depths of Win32, you were easily employable as a senior/principal engineer at a ton of other companies.
Nowadays the number of C++ Windows development positions is so low that unless a developer wants to spend their entire life at Microsoft, learning native Windows development is basically wasted time on the resume.