Reply to "Last phase of the desktop war":
Hi! I've been having a similar hypothesis for several months now well before I read this post (but possibly after you posted it) - that MS wants to deprecate the windows internals code. This is because in today's economy where the talented workers are increasingly both geeky (= loving their work) and hackers (= resourceful, rule bending, fate-defying, action heroes), there are fewer and fewer sw devs who are willing to work on it. That's because every proposed change may break backcompat ( API war ) and so is often rejected unless it is critical ( security/etc.) .
As I note in a (CC-by; WiP, but in a usable condition) essay titled "Commercial Real Person Fan Fiction (RPFs), crossovers and parodies as geeky imperatives (as of 2021)" the Smartphone wars/etc. patent trolls were or likely shall be deprived of enthusiastic/geeky lawyers. It's interesting to note that even if employers with thankless or aggravating jobs are not deprived of users or customers, they can be deprived of employees.