And this commenter on AskWoody I think gets to the root of it:

<< The “investment” world is not connected to the “run the business” world, and most certainly not the “deliver quality products” world. That seems to be the root of all this. If you’re a consumer, you want a flawless, high quality product that’s going to deliver good value and last a long time. Most investors, however, want the company they’ve invested in to be ruthless in pursuit of their dividends. >>

<<Full Disclosure: I worked at M$ from 2014-2015.

MS has some very talented programmers. They’re not very common, but they exist. The problem is that the entire company is completely and totally focused on developing an absurd number of new features and products, giving them completely unrealistic deadlines, and then shipping software on those deadlines no matter how half-assed or buggy it is...>>

<< New features are prioritized over all but the most system-critical bugs, and teams are never given any time to actually focus on improving their code. The only improvements that can happen must be snuck in while implementing new features.

As far as M$ is concerned, all code is sh*t, and the only thing that matters is if it works well enough to be shown at a demo and shipped. Needless to say, I don’t work there anymore.>>

I figured something like this must be happening.

It's just weird.

That last quote was apparently copied from https://itvision.altervista.org/why-windows-10-sucks.html , with a broken source link that is actually

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10937526

I don't understand why the software industry is hellbent on unlearning all the lessons of software development learned in the last 60 or so years.

@bob Probably! But Microsoft has been driven by capital since the 1970s and at least in the mid 2000s, got itself into a better space on product quality than it is right now.

I wonder what changed? Cos the quality drop and race for features seemed to hit the whole industry circa 2010, even outfits like Mozilla.