It’d be much more impactful if critical OS configuration was done either via text files (ala *nix) or cli. Either would need to be feature complete and discoverable/documented very well.
Windows is not UNIX, we ought to keep it that way. Its object-oriented model is in many ways better than UNIX's everything-is-text-or-a-bunch-of-bytes model.
> if critical OS configuration was done either via text files
Ah, please, no. On Linux today we have a terrible jumble of configuration files in .conf, .ini, .yaml, .toml, even .json and .xml...
IMO the Windows Registry was a fantastic way to store settings, and Microsoft should return its usage. It's not like Linux distro don't have something similar in systemd...
You mean dconf? What part of systemd is like the registry?
Sometimes you can do something via PowerShell, but only by using PowerShell to directly call some 'raw' .NET API.
Sometimes there's a native CLI utility that'll do what you want, but it's one of the DOS-like, pre-PowerShell commands, and the PowerShell equivalent is missing or unsuitable.
Even when a native PowerShell API exists, it can be difficult to find the documentation for it because Windows culture is to document GUI solutions first (and often GUI solutions only).
Try as one might, Windows remains a platform inherently hostile to automation. Doing automation and/or configuration management on Windows sucks.
Different demographics will probably need different solutions. The important thing isn't what solutions they come up with, it's that they choose a system and stick with it. To me it's understandable that Event Viewer isn't part of the main Settings app (plenty of IT folks would be upset if anything about Event Viewer changed). But Mouse Acceleration options really should be.
VBScript, JScript and nowadays Poweshell.