In some ways. Gates deserves never-ending enmity for plaguing us with backslashes in paths. But in others, Microsoft advanced the state of UI and UX more than anyone else in the '90s.
"Would of?"
There is no universe where that is true.
Win95's UI was so incredibly influential that stuff introduced by it are still around to this day.
I think they made something really revolutionary at the IE3 time. Their News and Mail app was an Explorer extension that placed an e-mail reader as the presentation of a folder full of folders of mailboxes and messages. You wouldn't see the extension, as the apps launched as applications, but that's what the implementation looked like from what I investigated back then.
Unfortunately, the idea was seemingly abandoned almost immediately. I would love to have such views on top of a user-space file system keeping messages, address books, and calendars in sync.
Of course, working at an ISP I could also telnet to our NNTP server and read Usenet on the local filesystem. Ugh.
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/009-passwo...
However i meant stuff like the desktop metaphor (Macintosh also had one but Win95's approach was more popular and mimicked in other environments), the start menu, the taskbar, etc, some newly introduced controls like tabs (i think OS/2 had tab-like controls/containers but they worked differently to those in Win95 and nowadays pretty much all tabs work like in Win95).
I wonder how hard it would be to get NeXT source from the 1990's and compile it on macOS 26.
As pointed out elsewhere, NeXT broke a lot of new ground at that time, thanks in part to its Unix underpinnings. Also Adobe brought great font management to both PCs and Mac before both embraced TrueType. Next had sub pixel anti-aliasing from the start.