[anaisbetts]

The Windows Kernel is a quite well-maintained and well-written piece of software. I would say one thing that can be frustrating is that the NT kernel simply does a ton of stuff, and breaking compatibility with all of that stuff is not an option. I once had a one character fix in NLS, that turned into two separate 500+ line AppCompat shims

It leads to code being Complicated, and a lot of Kobayashi Maru situations where there is no good solution to an engineering problem, just a bunch of bad compromises. Depending on your area, you might run into this all the time, or you might not.

[rot13xor]

"Write once, run for 20 years" is a strong value proposition. I dabbled in web dev and it's rare for third party libraries and services to go a year without breaking interface changes. Meanwhile a program written for Windows XP will likely still run on Windows 11 even without a recompile (perhaps the source code was lost). In the worst case you might have to run the binary in XP compatibility mode.