I learned Win32 programming from the Petzold book circa 1993.

Pretty much everything in there still works, if I type it in and compile it with the current Visual C/C++ toolchain. I might need to get rid of a few MOVEABLE and DISCARDABLE tags here and there, I suppose.

I would hope that the windows developers who are working on the windows shell would know how to write a windows native application in C. If it's that bad, they should improve the API, not just write it all in react instead

Windows 7 was not written in react, it looked great and worked great. Get those guys to write the UI for Windows 11.

This is such a ridiculous argument. Applications were developed long before JavaScript was a thing.