Not sure what this is a reference to. Microsoft STILL supports running VB6/COM/C++/etc from the 1990s today. Only Visual J++ disappeared, but a court of law required that. I'd go so far as to claim that their success is in no small part because their backwards compatibility game is top notch.
IE6 was a nightmare, but that wasn't "pulling the rug" rather just being lazy and not developing the browser at all (because it competed with their proprietary platform -- Win32). Once Microsoft deploys something and developers start using it, typically they support it "forever" (even IE compatibility modes remain to support IE5/6 code).
I tend to prefer software that works everywhere I do. I use Windows, Linux and Mac on a daily basis. Though haven't done desktop Linux in close to a decade at this point (next desktop will likely change that).
On the flip side, I actually appreciate that MS has done a number of apps with web and electron focus. VS Code shows you can do a well performing editor in a browser, I almost didn't even try it after atom and brackets. That it's on all three, I really appreciate. WTF the Teams app isn't available on Linux irks me to no end. The Azure SQL Studio is also progressing nicely. I also happen to like the relative ease of using Azure's services, but it's more than I'm going to pay on hobby projects.