@DavidGA @retrocomputing Exactly, here’s the canonical The Old New Thing post on the topic. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24063

tldr:
“MS-DOS served two purposes in Windows 95: It served as the boot loader. It acted as the 16-bit legacy device driver layer.”

“Among other things those drivers did was “suck the brains out of MS-DOS,” transfer all that state to the 32-bit file system manager, and then shut off MS-DOS.”