I often have a hard time telling if I'm being nostalgic. For me, 7 was peak Windows, but Win2K/XP would rank pretty close as well. I suppose the question for me is what have subsequent releases given us; what can we actually do with more recent versions of Windows that we could not accomplish back then?
I was one of those people who stuck to classic theme all the way up to Win7, but that was the version that finally made me switch because the fancy default theme in it actually looked pretty well after they made the glass effects of Vista more subtle. WinXP looked like some kind of cheap plastic horror in comparison.
It's very funny to look at Apple progressing from "looks like Vista" to "looks like Win7" in its iOS 26 betas.