I was historically a Windows user and started my career as a Windows sysadmin for a few years—I switched to macOS for a few years and came back as it became increasingly buggy and Microsoft's development story changed.
The complaints seem to come from heavily technical folks that think LTSB branches are reasonable things for normal people to run. I wouldn't want to run one on my own machine.
Sure, it's Windows 10 without any of the cruft—but also, none of the good bits. Believe it or not, but the Windows Store is great; managed updates of everything from Slack to Spotify, without individual updater components. Photos app, with support for HEIC files and so on, built in. These things are actually useful!
The missteps were W8-8.1 and WS2012. W10 and W2012R2 and beyond have been much better. Not perfect, but leagues better than the those disastrous years between.
Remember when Windows Server 2012 didn't have a start menu button, but instead a pixel? I hope someone was fired for that blunder.
Oh man, I'll tell you—Windows 8 was a beast of its own. I think that is how people remember Windows, and assume that Windows 10 is the same. But god, don't remind me of that awful full-screen server start menu..............I remember that's when we actively started to try and go full headless with Windows Server, but it was also half-baked back then.
I was a windows guy, then did the "I got a mac and never looked back" and now I'm back on windows 10 and, yes I'm pissed off, but this comment is pretty well realistic.
People have a tendency to say "never" when you really shouldn't say never.
The complaints seem to come from heavily technical folks that think LTSB branches are reasonable things for normal people to run. I wouldn't want to run one on my own machine.