Menus from Win95 are uniform. All buttons took up one row and a full width of the submenu. (Even if you don't have a shortcut key assigned, the space is taken up and wasted)

It's well acknowledged that modern designers and users benefit from large vs small, and other varying styles of organization.

Menus only had top menus vs submenu vs sub-sub-menu (and so forth). Yes a good menu is useful but...

A ribbon offers many more tradeoffs. It's harder to design a good ribbon, but the best ribbons are always better than even the best menu. The important features will be physically larger with more text and space. The less important or niche features might just be an icon with tooltip, possibly hidden behind a subcategory of the ribbon.

In theory, you can use the modern Ribbon to make old school menus. But why bother? If you made the switch to that XML design language, you might as well take all the benefits of the Ribbon

Or hell, if you like old school menus, you can still make them today. Those .RC editors still work in modern Windows 11. But give it a shot and you'll see how restrictive and bulky old school menus are in practice.