One thing about the old menus is that they were extremely configurable. Like, you could not just hide or reorder items, but reorganize the hierarchy if you wanted. People mostly used that for toolbars, but Office menus are technically a kind of toolbar.

Some of that still lives on in Visual Studio, where it is even extended to context menus: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-cus...