The problem is building (operating) systems that are orders of magnitude more complex than what are possible to fully understand or reason about. I don't think the top developers in the world could avoid catastrophic errors to sometimes creep into systems of that size and complexity.

Not defending Microsoft specifically, as I moved on from their operating systems to Linux 30 years ago, but I just do not see what they could hope to do. Amount of interactions to worry about will grow at least quadratic with the size of a system and there is just no way to expect human (or LLM) developers to keep up with that beyond some (very small) upper limit of system size. No matter how good the developers are and what programming languages or tools they use the result will be a house of cards of flaky components interacting in ways no one can fully predict.

While obviously very difficult, making Windows into a much more cohesive and bug free experience isn't impossible. Windows used to be a lot more cohesive, and I have no doubt it's possible to go back to that while also keeping the stuff that's good. The problem with that is that it requires walking back a lot of decisions which were made by people higher up the chain than those actually making the changes, and it's hard to walk back bad decisions by people high up the chain.

Microsoft also at least used to be capable of fixing bugs in Windows pretty well. XP Service Pack 2 consisted of mostly just that, in order to make a much more stable OS. And it worked quite well. But that was back in the day when Microsoft had a proper QA department and actually gave a shit about the user experience.

> but I just do not see what they could hope to do.

Cut scope. Would you rather have a laptop that sleeps when you close the lid, or one that occasionally does for a bit but not if a thousand different types of events occur, some valid some random? Because right now sleep may as well not exist for a huge number of users.