The difference is that winforms basically had one way to do everything which expedited development because it skipped all of the infinite number of stupid small decisions and libraries that must be cobbled together in a typical SPA.

Win32 could do it all. And in windows there was often a different way to handle things like video across each major OS version. Yet still, I feel it was simpler! Crazy!!

This seems true in the same sense that every language is theoretically equivalent because they’re Turing complete: technically true.