I never worked at MSFT, but I did work on a few extremely popular consumer-facing products across big tech that had a negative reputation. One product was super hated feature of a bigger and well-loved service (literally "why can't I turn this off") and the other was perceived to be super useful but poor-quality. I think I can understand the experience of those MSFT employees. They know the reputation, and they're sorry, but they need to work, and everyone fights with the product team.
At the former, I started right after school and was baffled no one I worked with ever used our product. I found it super demoralizing to build something so heavily used but unpopular, and eventually I quit out of frustration. I tried to change the product, and improve features, and frequently met with our product and UX people to no avail. We existed, of course, because sometimes popular free products need to serve business goals (thankfully not ads at least).
At the latter, we just had the challenge of building a complicated product, and with millions of users, you'll always get complaints. I had coworkers who would check reddit every morning and share all the complaints people had and really took it to heart. Of course, we could never properly debug or do anything for these random users, and "at scale" a 0.00001% error rate still meant a lot of disappointed people. It was still pretty demoralizing after a while but at least we could say people found us useful, even if it wasn't "fun".
