It was more like, ok cool, install the new version and then mess around with it for a few hours and after a while you generally feel ok about the decision and it felt like an upgrade. I know XP had a huge backlash in how it looked initially and I remember thinking I'd use Windows 2000 until the end of days but XP was really stable and handled a bunch of games without issues which ultimately trumped everything else for me at the time.
Maybe I started with 95c, I don't remember. It was around the end of 1996. You're right in that often times new hardware came with a new OS version but I've had a few OS only upgrades over the years that felt good. The current machine I'm on now ran Windows 7 for years before eventually I was semi-forced into 10.
95 was only good in its final iteration, 95c. 98 was a bit of a shit show, 98 SE was kinda stable. 2000 had lots of driver problems for about the first year because it was decidedly different. XP and 7 went kinda smooth, I have to admit that.
But no, I've hardly ever been excited. I upgraded when it was time or when I got new hardware, because by the time the new version came out I had finally got rid of most of the problems with the version before that and/or identified annoying hardware/drivers.