It's, still true, every other windows release is shitty. Just look at them: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows 11.
10 was full of spyware from the outset but for some reason people argue that it is better than 11 in this regard in a weird bit of revisionist history. The biggest problem with Windows 11 is it dumps hardware support for anything remotely old.
If you use an alternate shell then you get an error msg as it expects explorer/start menu.
A lot of the unwanted parts of Win8 lived on, but they could mostly be ignored, they weren't aggressively shoved into your face