> That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8.

There was something else going on during that time period though.

Consumer operating systems in the 1990s were pretty bad. Windows 9x and MacOS Classic didn't even have protected memory. They crashed a lot.

Microsoft fixed this with Windows NT (delivered to consumers as Windows XP), Apple with BSD/NeXT (delivered as OS X). It was the point when ordinary people first got computer operating systems that were fully baked. But the earliest versions (Windows NT/2000 or NeXTSTEP/OS X pre-Snow Leopard) still had the problems that come with new code, so the later releases were better. Hence, the best version of MacOS was Snow Leopard and the best version of Windows was XP (or, depending on who you ask, 7). Because that's when they finally made a decent release.

Once we had operating systems that do essentially what operating systems are supposed to do, since then it has felt like nothing but lateral moves and deterioration because there wasn't much left on the table for newer versions to win but every update is another chance to break or lose something we used to have.