Nope. They were raised.
Vista's minimum requirements were [1]
A modern processor (at least 800MHz)
512 MB of system RAM memory
A graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable
a 1 GHz or faster processor
1 GB (32-bit OS) or 2 GB (64-bit OS) of RAM,
16 GB (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit) available disk space
a DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver.
[2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...
Plus Vista's UAC was far too intrusive.
I agree, but I think that technology journalists were too harsh on this aspect of Vista. It was Microsoft's only really serious attempt at shoring up single-user security on Windows, and I think that its poor reception contributed to Microsoft neglecting to make any improvements thereafter. xkcd.com/1200 is still embarrassing relevant over a decade later.
But in the vista days security was not yet so much on the radar for most people. In fact even for companies. I remember working for a company where all the laptops had the same local admin password which was the company name + "123". I'm not exaggerating. There was also no full disk encryption used. These were also the days most websites would use plain http.
With that in mind I just don't think the importance was clear yet to most users. They just saw the negatives, not the benefits. Post Stuxnet and Wannacry/NotPetya things are really different.
Ps: it wasn't like that for all of course. I also worked for another company in the late 90s that had all their laptops equipped with windows NT 4.0 with full disk encryption (aftermarket of course as it wasn't yet built in), managed admin account and the whole shebang.
Time has probably colored my memory some. But pound for pound 7 ran better than Vista on equivalent hardware.
[0]: https://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-8-1-service-configurations/
[1] http://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-10-service-configurations/
Typical nonsense people believe because it feels true.
Vista was perfectly fine. The problem was trying to run a 2006 OS on a 2001 machine during a time of both great stagnation in OEMs and great progress overall.
I used Windows Vista beta as my primary OS on my new computer that summer and that thing was amazing.
Personally I think 98, 2000, XP, 7, and to a lesser 10, were all stellar releases from Microsoft. None of those would be the GOAT, but the closest in my mind was 7, which dropped when I was doing tech journalism and I had the time and space to poke at it in an extended fashion