Yes, the "Classic" style in XP looks somewhat closer to Windows 98, or the original Windows NT builds. Weirdly, there's a Wikipedia article which covers the available themes, and it has good examples of each:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_visual_styles

Personally I liked most of these visual themes, but that may be biased by how snappy and responsive the UI felt compared to later entries, especially Vista, which introduces the translucent windows thing that Microsoft has kept moving forward. I know my GPU can do those effects in its sleep now, but when it first launched it was painfully slow on normal-people computers lacking the requisite graphics acceleration. That combined with Vista's initially poor Superfetch implementation (constant hard drive activity and weird pauses) and the whole modern themes thing just left a bad taste.

Ignoring Windows specific things, I'm personally fond of a UI that is easy to scan, tells me what I need to know, and gets out of the way. Electron apps that do this well don't bother me, I don't need the whole OS to agree, but I do wish that application designers choosing to ignore the system themes would at least implement a dark theme.