Windows was only ever better than DOS, by the same vendor. It's been awful compared to any competitor it's ever had. Really. I don't see a non-gaslighting argument for Windows anywhere.
TBH, Windows 3.1 was reasonably nice compared to macOS 7, and much faster than OS/2 or Solaris 2.1 on the same hardware.
I can't say much about Solaris, I used it - much later - on sparc and amd64.
I can say that I was writing 16 bit windows apps in '95, including drivers and VxDs, and Win 3.1 was a piece of garbage inside and out.
Also, Windows 3 would run on 286 computers (as would OS/2), which made the barrier of entry very low. I started running it on a 286 with a Hercules adapter.
The two operating systems were trying to solve different problems, and had different system requirements because of that. Windows 3.1 was fine for running multiple interactive applications since neither application would be doing real work in the background. When Windows 95 entered the picture, that changed and its system requirements weren't all that different from OS/2.
And that is just one example. Windows 3.1 didn't provide much in the way of memory protection. (From my recollections, it could detect a memory access violation. At that point it would blue screen.) One of OS/2's most noteworthy features was memory protection. All of a sudden you could use your computer for an entire day without losing work from crashing. Yeah, OS/2 would happily terminate an application (rather than the OS) when there was a memory access violation. On the other hand, it made it much easier for developers to detect and address such bugs.
On that last point: I have fond memories of bringing OS/2 boot disks to my high school programming classes after the upgrade to Windows 95 (and, when they started refusing to let me boot OS/2, they let me use the NT server). There was a world of difference between programming under OS/2 or NT verses Windows 95. No one bothered to try programming under Windows 3.1!
VB and Windows 3.11 paid for my first home. I wouldn’t enjoy programming in C in Windows though, and, IIRC, it was a while before Microsoft’s C tooling got a Windows version.
I'm not sure what the C situation was like for Windows 3.1. I did have Borland C++ and fiddled around with the Windows IDE a bit, but never recalled making any progress.