Microsoft GUI development is a mess. They don't seem to care. Just look at the mishmash of different GUI styles in Windows 11.

Thankfully I have been mostly insulated from it by sticking to Qt and C++ for the last 25 years.

Qt/Win is enough to get the job done. Not always pretty, but it works. I used to be somewhat ashamed I never learned the actual Win32 API to write native apps, but now it looks like that was time saved. This is a great article.