Different GUI toolkits look & feel is more or less unavoidable if you want backwards compatibility for 3rd party apps (and on Linux, one could read "3rd party" as "anything built on a different UI toolkit than the default desktop environment"). But Thom's conclusion:

"Whenever I experienced a short stretch of time where I felt “perhaps this isn’t so bad?”, one (or multiple) of the problems and issues described above would snap me out of it. For someone used to desktop Linux, where respect for the user, consistency, customisability, and performance are still held in high regard, Windows 11 feels like an endless string of punches in the face."

That's just pathetic for a multi-$B company with >200k employees. At least an OS's built-in apps should be functional, performant, easy to use, and get out of the way of users getting work done.

But that's not even the worst. The worst is that MS clearly doesn't care. MS only seems to care about slurping user's data, pushing unwanted crap (ads, AI features nobody asked for etc), and making sure Windows comes pre-installed on as many computing devices as possible. End users be damned.

If MS would care, then 30y+ of refinement, MS's resources, and Moore's law could have turned Windows into the smoothest, fastest, easiest to use OS on the planet. But alas.. here we are in a different timeline.