It's valid to feel disappointed. Windows 7 was really stable.
My work still has a windows 7 machine with an uptime of something like 12 years.
Windows 7 will idle in the low megabytes. But why does 11 want to use 6-8 Gigs on idle for no good reason?
And it's not like there's that much difference between the two operating systems. One is just loaded up with electron wrappers and spyware
Okay, I'll give you wsl2, and the "average user experience" being better, but Windows is losing its identity with the IT and customization front. For both destroying the win32 control panel and locking down the shell so you can no longer customize it.
Somewhat ironically OSX recently added widgets to the desktop. Something Microsoft did years ago, removed it for no reason, and then added a flyout to tick almost the same check boxes.
As for me, the spike in resource usage and over saturation of "AI" was enough for me to decide to jump ship.
I'm currently attempting to daily drive Manjaro so maybe my opinion will change, but so far, it feels like home.