You're forgettin literally all the versions of unix that existed at that time, solaris being prominent, but ibm had their own version, and so did many other companies, all of these ram x11 desktops, win95 was much farther from being the only option than windows 10 was before windows 11
I think Windows has been shit since it was an app that sat on top of dos. It's gotten a lot better now in countless ways, but overall, it's gotten worse than better. There was a time where I couldn't/wouldn't consider an alternative as a daily driver from 95 through to the end of 7 support really.
The enshitification of windows got worse with 10 (11 is another order of magnitude) and the oncoming eos, drove me off again about 18 months ago and I've been happier for it.
Every Windows version was shit when it came out, then became good through updates by the time the next version came out.
Except for Windows ME and 8, which were just shit.