Basically Microsoft tends to release operating systems in a 2 stage cycle. Every other version of Windows does something new and innovative, and then the next version is more polished, stable, and normal.

95 - new, innovative, and crappy
98 - solid
Then it got weird. They wanted to stop building the consumer version of Windows on top of DOS, and move it on to the NT kernel as 2000. The consumer version wasn’t ready by the deadline, so they released 2000 for business only, and released a new DOS based Windows Me.
2000 - Really nice but boring. Extremely innovative new features for business use (Active Directory). The amount of work they put into Active Directory is probably why they didn’t have the new consumer friendly UI ready in time. It’s a rock solid OS but they significantly missed their goals.
Me - Absolute garbage, a cash grab. They basically put something out to satisfy the bean counters since they couldn’t market NT to consumers yet.
XP - They finally pulled it off, and it’s a pretty good OS that has the stability of NT, and all the multimedia features that consumers want.
Vista - They rewrote a huge portion of NT to be 64 bit, require signed drivers, and be more stable. The release version was pretty crappy but after 1-2 service packs it was actually pretty decent. But by then its reputation was already tarnished, and overall it was innovative and crappy.
7 - This was a very solid release.
8 - Experimental implementation of adding a touch UI to Windows. They made a decent effort but it really felt like a tech demo and nobody recommended it for anything outside of tablet devices. It was dreadful for people using traditional mouse and keyboard.
10 - Another solid OS. They basically took 7, added 8’s touch UI features, and figured out how to blend them without it being annoying. The touch interface doesn’t get in the way if you’re using keyboard and mouse, and vice versa.
11 - I’m really not sure what the purpose of this OS is. I guess they’re experimenting with trying to make the Windows UI more Mac-like. The taskbar centers the icons by default so it looks like the MacOS dock, and they’re really pushing the new app store where all the apps have to be written with the newer UI libraries that work a lot more like mobile development platforms. So it really seems like Microsoft is planning for a future where Windows can run on many different types of devices and run the same apps. And Windows 11 is kind of a stepping stone to get there.
So Windows 12 should be interesting.