It has not been my experience that MS removes or weakens tools like that. What they do is hide them, like what they did in the transition from the control panel to the modern settings interface in 10/11. It's easier for people who don't know what they're doing to navigate (and harder for them to stumble into settings that could really mess things up), but it's just slower to navigate and harder to find the shit you want when you're not doing bog-standard end-user stuff. But also the control panel is still there and still works exactly how it used to, so you can just use it instead. If there's a 'watering down' there it's that the search function prefers to return results for for the settings menu rather than the control panel so you have to navigate to it by hand, but you can just pin that shit to your start menu like everything else and keep using it like it's still 2005.

The entire design is focused around making things HARDER to use. Less reliance on a terminal, dynamic menus whose contents are clusterfucked into little panels instead of proper menus.

Only for people who are doing complex technical stuff and accessing features that aren't commonly needed by the end-user. For everyone else not having 400 options that they don't understand and will never use cluttering everything up makes it easier to use, not harder. Most end-users never want to see a terminal, and those clustered toolbars make it easier - when coming at it fresh without years or decades of expectations - not harder to find what what you're looking for. Especially if you're visually impaired like I am. This strikes me as just 'the way I learned is faster' without the awareness that it's because you took the time to learn it and don't want to have to learn something new. And I get it. I spent hours and hours learning all of the menu hotkey combinations for Lotus 1-2-3 in the late 80s, and I was fast as shit at plucking out those obscure features from 12 menus deep with a few keystrokes, so I was very salty when Excel came along and displaced it with its graphical menus and mouse pointer that was so much slower than the hotkeys I had learned. But also Excel was vastly more popular than Lotus 1-2-3 ever was because it was a lot easier for accountants to use, and Excel has (or had, I haven't used it in a while) hotkeys for most of its menu items anyway (alt+key to pull down a menu, then each entry had a letter underlined so you could quickly pick that option, much like using /, (w)orksheet, (c)olumn, (a)dd or whatever from Lotus 1-2-3.)

That's not 'watering down', that's improving: making things better for the vast majority of people, while requiring folks like us - whose entire job is to learn and understand computer shit - to bear the burden of having to relearn a few things. I guarantee you there were programmers out there complaining about the widespread adoption of early high-level languages because 'by god the best way to code is to manually flip the bits in core memory with a magnet' or whatever, but it's no different than when new laws get passed or new diagnostic or treatment standards get approved. Technological progress and reinvention is just the nature of living in an industrial society. If you don't want to keep up with it, pick another field like I did.

when I get a flu shot, I sit in a chair and somebody who knows how to administer the shot gives it to me. ... Same with leases, I may sign one every few years at most, and if it’s for something serious then I would get a lawyer involved.

Exactly my point: you and an accountant both have a very shallow, straightforward experience with a complex technical subject because others have gone to considerable lengths to take care of the immense volume of technical details and obscure them from your view. I'm going to guess that you understand as much about how to safely store and administer vaccines or which of 12 related statutes applies to your particular case as he does about the SMTP protocol or Ethernet, so why do you expect him to not get a professional involved when he runs into 'something serious' just like you do? And keep in mind that what seems trivial to you or I can be quite serious and intractable to him.

I am at least competent enough to sit in the chair and get the shot without asking “what’s a chair? How do I sit? Where is my arm?” Likewise, I can read a lease and not have to ask “What is a lease? What is a signature? How do I sign this page?” I can’t say the same about people in 2025 who say “What’s the start button?” or have no idea that decades-old shortcuts like ctrl+c and ctrl+v are things.

This is a straw man. You are exaggerating the stupidity of others to create a false example against which you are arguing, and while a few of those people certainly exist (I had a guy tell me his computer wouldn't turn on and then when I asked him to try his response was to loudly say 'Computer, on! -- see? Nothing happens'), most people can muddle through simple stuff like navigating menus even if they don't know what they're called.

I did tech support for a couple of years in the late 90s, I have walked people who have literally never touched a computer before through replacing their motherboard (CPU, RAM, cables, even DIP switches and jumpers.) It's been my experience that there's a kind of mental line that most people draw that separates technical stuff into two categories: 'I can probably figure this out', and 'OMG this is way too much I don't even know where to start.' I have talked to many, many people on both sides of that line, and there seems to be no middle ground. People go from 'I think I can swim?' straight to 'holy shit I'm drowning'. When they've assigned computer stuff to the far side of that line they actively reject thinking about it, especially when jargon is involved. If you ask them where their files are stored they might gesture vaguely at the box under their desk, but if you ask them what a hard drive is they will shrug and go 'Iono man, must be some of that wacky technical shit I don't understand'. They have some idea what a hard drive - or a start button - is, they use it every day, but if you put them on the spot while they're in 'I dunno anything' mode they're not even going to try to make the connection and ask 'wait, is that the menu that all my programs are in?', they'll just go 'Dunno man, that must be some of that technical shit that's beyond me.'

And it works both ways. I have had certified network engineers tell me 'Of course it's plugged in, what kind of an idiot do you think I am?' when it turned out not to be plugged in. There's the stuff you know and the stuff you feel confident stretching for; everything else just doesn't even get considered.

As for how to copy/paste on those older computers - I guess it depends on how you’re accessing them as to whether or not you even can copy/paste. But at the same time, I wouldn’t be nearly as frustrated if somebody wasn’t quite sure how to navigate through something that isn’t as commonplace as a Windows computer - you might as well say you’re “not very competent with pencils and paper”.

The point is that you don't know because you don't have to, you've never had to use them (and what's 'commonplace' for you isn't necessarily common at all for others.) The same is true for those people who have been working in banks for decades and haven't seen anything more modern than an IBM PCjr. Your frustration that people don't understand stuff that's common to you is equivalent to their frustration that you don't know how to write programs in RPG2 or Fortran. They probably don't think you're stupid for not knowing why certain kinds of RAM can cause 'make world' on BSD systems to fail halfway through, so why do you think they are for not knowing stuff that they may not have been exposed to very much?

I think your expectations might be rather skewed. For example, do you know how common it is to just not own a PC in the days of ubiquitous consoles and tablets and smartphones? I have 11 adult nieces and nephews, two of them own PCs, and only then because their mother wanted someone to play WoW with her when they were kids and they stuck with PC gaming. But every one of them has a phone, at least an xbox or playstation, most of them own a Switch or Steam deck or similar, etc. Meanwhile the last console I owned still had wood paneling on the front (Atari 2600.) Peoples' experiences with technology are different, some are intrigued by it and drawn to learn more, some just see it as a tool that sits in a drawer until they need to turn some metaphorical bolts. It's absurd to assume that everyone has the same experience and interest and understanding with a subject that you do.