My theory: every (I'm exaggerating, more like most) systems programmer in the company was told to join Azure or get cut. Then outsourcing or something. It's been obvious that they don't have many experienced people left to work on native windows stuff for a while now. The constant churn in the platform apis and everything getting turned into a web app was the sign.
You see this on the surviving team keeping up WinUI 3.0 / WinAppSDK.
It is quite obvious from whoever takes place on community calls, or that still answers on endless Github discussions, that their background isn't Windows development.
You see this by them usually not understanding what the framework is still missing from MFC, Forms, WPF, both in features, and Visual Studio tooling.
All the key figures from Windows 8 days regarding WinRT, left for Amazon, Google, or internally to Azure and AI groups.
