What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

Among tech and design folks of a certain vintage, there is a fondness for the design language used by Windows from Windows 95 to Windows 2000. While you could argue that this is mere nostalgia, I've always thought there is more to it than that. The Windows 95 UI was famously the result of comprehensive UX studies and careful design . While Microsoft has always been Microsoft—a company defined by a lack of care in everything it puts out into the world—the developers and designers who worked on early versions