If I were an assuming feller I'd "almost guarantee" that you haven't been blessed/cursed with anything besides Windows 11.

A lot of my beef, personally, can be chalked up to Windows' aggressively long animation times. It's serviceable with them turned off. But even with animations turned off on an aggressively debloated consumer PC there is either a notable delay or a perception thereof in context menus and file explorer that did not exist with Windows 10, or on my Linux machines.

Speaking of animations, it’s shocking to me how bad they are.

I turned on hiding the taskbar the other day. I don’t think they’ve changed it since Windows 95. I have a modern gaming laptop, and the animation is purely linear, no acceleration. It feels so weirdly unnatural. Even worse, it’s not smoothly animated! I have a 120Hz monitor but it seems to be animated at 5fps.

Nobody on the Windows team seems to give a single shit at all.

From the comment you're replying to: "Windows does it better than my mac or Linux boxes by a mile"

So I wouldn't assume they've only used Windows. FWIW I also primarily use Windows 11 currently, but have also used other OS'es. I've experienced frustrations with all of them. Just because it's fast for you doesn't mean it's fast for everyone, and vice-versa. I could certainly buy that more people are having problems with 11 than they did with 10, though it hasn't been my personal experience. Just saying we shouldn't assume our own experiences are universal.