They've added a lot of features and it's almost like Photoshop Elements now. It has layers, general photo editing tools, an AI generator, etc.
Honestly I like layers in Paint. Even pixel art programs have layers.
Just like any text editor is doomed to become either Emacs or Word, so any image editor is doomed to become Photoshop.
I remember that when Paint started being funky I found a Windows XP exe and used that. I want Paint to be the graphical equivalent of hexedit.
Now that I'm on Linux, I use jspaint.app.