> even though it does about the same as Windows 7 did.

That is your opinion. Did you check the number of svchost.exe instances on the two OSs ? Did you check the number of system processes.

Win 11 has telemetry, to improve it. It really cares about your security, although the bad guys are still able to install ransomware. And, the most important, Windows 11 has rounded corners and 3D acceleration for the 2D windowing system.

See ? A lot of improvements. Now of course, you have 2 (gray) colour choices: light or dark. But this is because of astonishing advances in Computer Science.

And, last but not least, a quote from John Malkovitch: see youtube Space Force.

/s

Yeah, I did forget that it has the visually stunning flat UI that everyone kept begging Microsoft to add. So maybe the multi-gigabyte memory size increase was worth it after all.