Starting any GUI app development on Windows is very frustrating right now.. Winforms (dead, ugly), WPF (nearly dead), UWP (deprecated), WinUI2 (deprecated), WinUI 3 (buggy, maybe in a year), .NET MAUI (also immature).
Dead and ugly are both kind of vague terms open for debate so I'm not arguing your main point here (and I'm not the person you responded to) ...
... but as someone who did a lot of Win32/UI App programming back in the late 1990s and early 2000s (up to and including early WinForms), I recently looked through the landscape of available UI toolkits and can confirm that as someone who hasn't been keeping up with this stuff for years its INCREDIBLY confusing as to what technology you should build new projects on looking through the graveyard of half abandoned aborted starts Microsoft seems to have made from back then until now, with almost everything being officially deprecated or early access/unfinished.
The fact that WinForms might still be the best solution for starting a new project on is more of a condemnation of Microsoft's combined efforts in this area than it is something to be celebrated, IMO.
Imagine the confusion of someone frozen in cryo around 2006 waking up now: Wait, that C# wrapper for Win32 is the recommended MS GUI framework? What went wrong?!
Personally I think web UI via WebView2 is the only way forward; Chromium is far and away the most powerful UI framework shipping with Windows these days. Even if "native" UI frameworks were doing everything right, it's hard to compete with all the investments in Chromium.
P.S. WinForms isn't dead; it's maintained by the .NET team and it gets a lot more attention than WPF. But, well, it's WinForms :)
Add to the mess that for some stuff we are expected to add C++ to the mix, and C++/WinRT tooling is like going back to the good old ATL days in Visual C++ 6.0.
