Delphi's FireMonkey is in many ways similar to WPF in the way you can manipulate UI elements, except all the fluff and cruft WPF/XAML has. On the plus side, FireMonkey is multi platform too.

VCL is still the tried and tested UI framework for Windows only applications though, nothing beats its flexibility.

I would almost like XAML, if it wasn’t for styling. If it had some CSS like DSL, I’d use it more, but unfortunately overcrowding styles invokes nasty blobs of XML boilerplate often having to override stuff that doesn’t seem relevant to what you want to do.

Isn't wpf deprecated too? I wish there was an official way to make apps in windows...

Not really, I doubt WinUI will ever match it in features, so most enterprises will keep ignoring it.

Basically Win32, Forms, WPF for .NET, Win32/MFC for C++, or web stuff like ASP.NET, possibly with Blazor.

Even though UWP did not went away, and they keep at the N interaction of it with WinAppSDK, I would lose any sleep over it.

Same feeling about WPF. XAML just never caught on with me and I stayed with Forms for a long while after WPF came out. With XAML, it seemed like they were trying a bit too hard on declarative.

Now working in SwiftUI, which is declarative but in a more understandable way, with a View building mechanism behind it that ties things together so that you understand what you're doing a bit better. Not sure I'm explaining that well...

Not good enough at it yet to build anything fast, but I could see that being the case after a few more months with it.

You can ignore XAML if you make WPF app as like WinForms, just use GUI designer and absolute layout. It's not considered to good but it should work.

But in that case, why even use WPF if I can just keep using WinForms? Besides, judging by the news and announcements on the Microsoft site, it would seem that WinForms is still being sort of developed while WPF is... pretty much dead.

You can easily adopt WPF features later, compared to migrate WinForms to WPF. I think both WinForms and WPF are being sort of developed, but WinForms is old so it have more developing needed area, like accessibility and HiDPI.