Besides the general awfulness of Windows that you describe, have you looked at C:\Windows recently? It is an unorganised mess with multiple different case styling all over the place. I get this is not that important but I can't help feel it illustrates just how little care is taken behind the scenes. The whole thing seems like a nightmare to deal with.

I had a fresh install of Windows on a new computer which refused to install updates until I ran a bunch of commands in the "terminal". The whole thing is beyond fixing at this point.