it's handy for config, sure. but it has several downsides. very opaque compared to a config file.. keys can't have comments. the average user has no idea what a "dword" is. some registry paths are obscenely long. you can accidentally break one program or windows trying to edit another's settings. and i'm not sure currently, but a big problem in the past was uninstallers didn't remove registry keys reliably.

personally, i think XDG_CONFIG_HOME + a robust config file framework with a standardized format (yaml/toml, whatever) would work as well. being able to specify a schema could be extremely useful, too, to prevent borked configs. as you've said, we've seen a lot of tools/OS's go this direction. and it doesn't have to be perfect, the 80% case would be a huge improvement.

i'm also sure the registry made a lot of sense at the time. it was probably way quicker than reading and parsing files. we didn't care so much about sandboxing/isolation and backing up. people probably had less application installed.

I was warned far more than necessary about corrupting The Holy Windows Registry Hive, I think that’s the entirety of the problem with it.