There were also more devices running OS X before iOS, watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS were created.
They were actually pretty close with Windows Phone but they bifurcated the API losing developers, did a bad job of the app store, and generally underestimated the importance of mobile. Even their Silverlight tech was very mature when they killed it rather than finding it new home(s).
This is basically MS giving up and using up their customer base of Windows Xbox until they become irrelevant.
C++/CX was the first time they finally offered something comparable to C++ Builder on the Microsoft stack.
The Windows team killed C++/CX replacing it with C++/WinRT and to this day there is no Visual Studio support for it, making even the ageing MFC feel more attractive than writing IDL files with a notepad like experience, manually copying files around.
It might be a better experience than raw COM as they were doing before with WRL template library, but surely not for the 'Developers, Developers' out there.
Then since .NET Native isn't handled by the .NET team, it might just die stuck in C# 7.
As for the rewrites, not only was WinRT a reboot, the initial version in Windows 8 required different implementations for phone, tablet and desktop.
On Windows 8.1, there was some unification on the view level, merging phone and tablets models, this UAP was born.
With the release of Windows 10, UAP became UWP.
As few companies were adopting the UWP app model, eventually XAML Islands came to be.
As that failed to gain adoption, and it became clear, just like in Android, that people don't continuously upgrade their OS as their browsers, UWP needed to be detached from the OS and Project Reunion came to be.
A project still at version 0.5 with lots of unknowns how to expose common UWP features, no roadmap for XBox and HoloLens, while WinUI is at 1700+ issues and barely has parity with WPF.
While at the same time you have Forms, WPF with a very relevant customer base, alongside Blazor and MAUI teams also looking for developers eyes, without the designer tooling of the former.
I feel that in the middle of this management confusion, lack of development tooling and missing features, Forms, WPF and MFC are the best bets even for green field applications on Windows.
It feels like trying to move the ship back to what should have been Window 8 to keep developers around, while having too many people on the ship bridge.
Pity, it was supposed to have a proper Win32 sandbox model.
