It doesn't help that they messed up everyone that actually bought into the WinRT dream, forcing us to go through multiple rewrites across the WinRT evolution and at the same time dowgrade in tooling.
WinRT 8 => WinRT 8.1 (UAP gets introducted) => WinRT 10 (UWP gets introduced) => WinUI/XAML Islands/XAML Direct => Project Reunion => Back to Win32 with WinAppSDK/WinUI 3.0
In the process, .NET Native and C++/CX get deprecated, Native AOT and C++/CX are not at the same feature parity level, there is no designer, hardly any updates, Github issues keep growing exponentially.
Except for WinDev with Windows 11 UI updates, and everyone that has gotten too deep into WinRT, everyone else went back to classical .NET and Win32 frameworks, or Web alongside "Azure OS".
Even the XDK has dropped WinRT support and refocused on Win32 with the new GDK.
This is exactly why programming for windows now stinks so hard. There is no clear 'build this kind of application'. They pop out a new 'this is the best framework ever' every 2-3 years now (since about 2003). Then pretty much abandon whatever it was the previous 'best ever'. Whoever is in charge of their dev tools is driving the windows devs mad. We have 2 IDEs from them and about 10 different SDKs targeting random niches. Then MS being MS they sort of drag it along because someone is paying for it. But not making it clear to anyone else what is going on and you should not use that. The other 6 eco systems out there are not much better with whoever their champion is and doing very similar things.
For windows itself they also abandoned their style guides. So now you get random levels of win3.1 to win11 GUI popping out with different amounts of how does this work. Nothing is consistent and sort of half 'we are a tablet' and half 'we are a desktop' motif.
Them 'abandoning' win32 was a serious misstep. They should have built that up and had any of their new fancy frameworks building on that.
WinRT 8 => WinRT 8.1 (UAP gets introducted) => WinRT 10 (UWP gets introduced) => WinUI/XAML Islands/XAML Direct => Project Reunion => Back to Win32 with WinAppSDK/WinUI 3.0
In the process, .NET Native and C++/CX get deprecated, Native AOT and C++/CX are not at the same feature parity level, there is no designer, hardly any updates, Github issues keep growing exponentially.
Except for WinDev with Windows 11 UI updates, and everyone that has gotten too deep into WinRT, everyone else went back to classical .NET and Win32 frameworks, or Web alongside "Azure OS".
Even the XDK has dropped WinRT support and refocused on Win32 with the new GDK.