I have a few examples:

• Flight Sim 2020
• Windows Defender is the best antivirus, better than all those paid crapware antiviruses
• An attempt at an independent browser engine that wasn’t the dated IE
• This is a hot take but seamless integration of local file storage with OneDrive. Yes, they are way too heavy-handed about forcing this on you and it’s really stupid how it moves your files without telling you, but I’ve never seen a file manager that handles both local and cloud files faster than W10’s file manager (a big part of the reason why I was mad about W11, because that advantage disappeared)

The only useful thing I can think of after the pandemic is the CPU scheduling updates for Alder Lake, but that was pretty much a necessity. Everything else is AI overhype, rewriting programs to make them slower, and/or yet another way to invade people’s privacy