The ease of OS modification was certainly a double-edged sword...how much of the instability of the OS was because of drivers and other OS mods is hard to say.
I recently bought a Powermac G4/553 DA model and it's really responsive with Classic. One of the last Classic-compatible models. But it feels really simple compared to any modern OS.
And something I've forgotten in 20 years since the last usage of Classic: There's no real multi-tasking. Uncompressing zip or sit packages basically blocks the whole OS until the work is done.
Oh and other things taken for granted nowadays I've forgotten: one can use _the same computer for other things when scanning photos_. Then even the fastest computer was blocked until the scanning was completed :D
It absolutely screams (Photoshop 5.5 cold launches in about 1.5 seconds), and I'm not sure how much of this is pure nostalgia, but the look and feel of classic Platinum Mac OS is friendly in a way that's really hard to describe.
Of course this machine is only useful for opening all my old documents from the '90s, but I plan on keeping it in a working state for many years to come, if for no other reason than to let the nerds of the future get a taste of what computing was like before the internet destroyed everything.
And yet it has now been abandoned in favor of UNIX style "scatter and hide everything, but include an overengineered piece of software to manage it in very limited ways for the user".
I personally think that this is because developers once largely thought of their products as existing to enable users, whereas contemporary developers think of their products as herding or farming users.
I submit that this observation also applies to Windows 9x.
In reality, we don't need to imagine it. Windows 9x was like that and, unsurprisingly, easily pwned.
Delete it all.
And the companies that have the power to drive it into newer territories, like Google, don't care about providing yet another UNIX clone, just reducing the kernel development costs.
Had Inferno been a success, I bet we would also see blog posts on how to dump Limbo, replace ACME with vim, and have the GNU userland on it.
I don't either. But a boy can dream.
Given Windows 10X original design goals, you might need to move to somewhere else eventually, if they go through with it.
This simplicity and accessibility of the internals of the OS is what I miss (and I moved to Windows when OSX scrapped that).