This is hands down the worst Old New Thing he ever wrote. He either is, or at least should be, ashamed of the poor engineering his colleagues are doing, and trying weakly to defend them.

Monkeying with critical sections is hard. Monkeying with them due to performance and memory optimization while maintaining correctness is incredibly hard. If they'd done a good job of it, no one would have noticed, and Raymond would have had a cool story to tell. Instead we got this.

Sigh, Microsoft, what's happening over there?