The database-backed configuration mechanism makes a ton of sense, and if you squint, the filesystem is really kind of a database anyway. With the registry, there’s a lot you get for free—you can set defaults system-wide, you don’t have to deal with parsing, you can get new values without re-parsing a file, etc.

A lot of the horror stories came from earlier versions of Windows which had problems with reliability.

If you spend time as a Windows sysadmin you can start to appreciate it, because it does make certain administration tasks easier. Like “I need to change 10 registry different keys on 50 different machines” is easier on Windows. On Linux, I’d do the same with, like, Ansible scripts which can be a lot more error-prone to write.