I skipped 8/8.1 purely because the look of it annoyed me. XP and 7 basically ran flawless on all my machines I had them on. I wasn't too annoyed with 10 on HDD, but SSD definitely helped. 11 felt fundamentally identical to 10 for me for the first few years, and the AI stuff was when everything fell apart for me. It may be a matter of luck, ignorance, and not understanding quite what was wrong.
The situation with Windows the last few years has left me cynical of this entire craze. hopefully things end up alright in the end.