As you already said, Azure is awful and only in second place behind AWS because of how much worse Google Cloud Platform is. Windows is back to sucking again, this time so hard that I'm seriously considering learning Linux and/or switching to macOS on my home system, & playing games on SteamOS instead. I almost never use Microsoft Office anymore, outside of household budgeting spreadsheets that I could easily work with LibreOffice instead.
I expect Azure is in second place because Windows-only shops use it because of the Official Microsoft Active Directory integration (which might be called Entra now?).
For basic "Create a VM, attach disks and networking, and use it as a computer." tasks, it is my professional experience that Azure is the worst of the Big Three US "cloud" providers by far. Their "control plane" is flaky and unreliable, so it's something that you'll probably only notice if you create, destroy, or modify VMs a lot. [0]
If you have a support contract, Azure makes it much easier to talk to a human than GCP does, but I never encountered an issue that they were able to solve. "File a ticket, but don't expect support to be able to help because they won't understand the problem, and it will eventually go away." was the lesson I eventually learned.
[0] And the word on the street is that a huge chunk of Github's reliability problems are caused because of the move from AWS to Azure. Having used all three pretty extensively, I believe the rumors.