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Completely true. Apple only cares about back-compact down to a few older major versions. So often the big projects (like modern apps, Windows 10 S, etc) Microsoft does fail or struggle to gain traction IMO because of the blessing and curse of their back-compat requirements.

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I think Apple has the right formula. The do put the effort in to maintain back compat to a certain point, but they also aggressively deprecate and remove within a few years of the arrival of a replacement technology. So you get the benefit of things not suddenly breaking, with the benefit of the whole ecoystem moving forwards. If that means old unmaintained software is left behind, then so be it. The right balance I think.

Those big-projects you mentioned failed to gain traction in the first place - with a tiny use-count for (e.g.) UWP vs Win32 it’s easy for MS to not take back-compat as seriously.

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