I think you might be confusing Windows ME with 2000.

Windows 2000 was built on the Windows NT kernel which was business focused so absolutely rock solid.

Windows 98 was a good jump in stability from the 95 kernel bit still very prone to crashing.

I agree XP was good but it was the successor to 2K so built on it and I moved to Linux as soon as the 2K directx support would have forced me to move to XP which wasn't as lightweight.

For clarity there were two development branches within Microsoft at the turn of the millennium: one that was based off windows 3.1 (and became 95, 98 and ME) and one that was based off windows NT 3.1 which was solid as fuck and eventually became 2000 then XP.

Edit: Here's a decent graphic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_versions#/media/File:Windows_Version_History.svg