I don't even think that it remained very familiar aside from a taskbar (that also changed in win11) and the fact that there are desktop icons when you install things via double clicking (the double click installing also optionally changed with the Microsoft store and the msi installers are almost entirely gone these days, totally different uis pop up now). Even core things that people definitely use like the uninstallation, settings etc. ui has changed completely for the worse. Windows has also changed a lot of its core ui over the years like the taskbar, the clock, the startmenu etc. I guess one thing you could say is that it was a gradual change over many versions but everytime people hate it. Really, what Linux should have done is what Windows has done with WSL: Offer a builtin compatability layer so that you can install windows apps on linux, perhaps prompting you to enter a windows license and then it will launch those apps in a VM, even per window/app.