Your experience with Windows/PCs over the last fifteen years must represent the mother of all train wrecks for you to honestly make a statement like that.
I sometimes wonder whether people actually remember what Win9x was like. I remember being amazed how different my initial experiences Windows NT 4.0 SP3 were (compared to other versions of Windows; I had been used to Win95 and Win98 up to that point), the fact that I could basically give it a load of work to do across a range of applications and it would get on with it. If a program crashed, the OS and other apps would carry on going 99% of the time. If the OS crashed, chances are that something serious needed investigating, rather than the standard-issue stiff breeze that would blow Win9x over the moment you gave it some real work to do.
I started with NT 1.0 on a DEC Alpha system and loved the multi-process ability and stability.
At the time, I need a PC type system with an OS (OS2 was not cutting it) that I could port a FORTRAN program to. Used Watcom for the compiler.
Started with the Alpha and then put together a semi-custom dual 486 that was duplicating a $300K mini computer
Yeah I found 98 se was horrible, random BSODs, lockups, general slowing down. I found it would get worse and worse over time and have to be reformatted all the time. 2000 was probably the most reliable. It was light weight like 98 but even more reliable than XP. When XP came out it was a bloated POS, at least till quad core and 1GB+ of ram became standard. OEMs were trying to sell it on PCs with like 256MB of ram and a single core processor, and it was bloody slow out of the box. Vista suffered the same issue.
That was when the cycle started that OS & programs could become bloated because the next generation of H/W would be powerful enough to cover those deficiencies. And so, it has continued onward.
Notice how MS has always increased the specifications of the minimal H/w needed to run their next OS.
If you want an OS that has the latest bells/whistles; you will need to also upgrade your H/W to utilize it.