To me that is more a sign that I finally arrived at a dialog I can trust to do what it says and which actually achieves what I have been looking for the whole time. To me trying to change something in Windows seems to be a hunt for that old window first, before I can do anything useful.

You're not wrong, and I share the sentiment. "Modern" panels are near worthless, I have to dig down to something crusty to actually expose useful settings I can tweak.

That's true about the stuff you reach from Settings. But I also learned that Windows has a nice way to adjust the settings, every setting is described by a few paragraphs, it is structured in a tree and actually understandable. And you even can enumerate them and know you have considered all of them, there is nothing playing hide and seek with you. Really crazy that this is built in into MS Windows. It's called Group Policy Editor. Not sure why not everyone is using that instead of the crappy slow Settings app.

Windows 8+ UI is just plain incompetence.

You may like or may not like the new settings panels, but making them incomplete and redirecting you to the old ones for the missing features is just wrong. Even worse, they have been gradually adding the missing features for more than 10 years, breaking all familiarity, and they still didn't manage to finish the job.

I don't know what happened internally but Microsoft went from being arguably the best in the world to something that is objectively terrible. You may not like liquid glass, but at least, there is intent behind it. With Microsoft today, it looks like a collection of internship projects.

Hah! I've seen the same TCP/IP Advanced Networking config ugly panel since Windows 95, up to Windows 10. It makes me feel at home, but it confirms your assessment.