This article immediately reminded me of a video I saw a while ago.[1] The long and short - MS basically laid off the staff that tested Windows, and much of it is automated nowadays (I bet the MBA educated executive at MS who was responsible for that got PHAT bonus, at the expense of Windows customers and laid off testing staff, of course). Seems like it happened in 2015, which is why it seems that windows updates hav…
Well, to be honest I much prefer - and trust - fully automated test pipelines to manuality. It affords more frequent and thorough verification of the final artifacts. The problem comes when the automation is only partial because added at a later stage, and the existing software does not lend itself to testing. The risk there is that some short-sighted line manager will go “YOLO, I have a deadline” and skip the tests…
I had two separate computers with very distinct hardware that both failed to upgrade to any of the semi-annual Windows releases. They would just get stuck in a reboot loop at the SSD storage driver loading section of the installer, which means that no errors could be written. Hence, no specific errors could ever be sent back to Microsoft other than "failed".
I eventually found a workaround myself, but the root cause was never fixed, and will never be fixed, because Microsoft is blind to it.
Similarly, anything that causes a BSOD gets reported back via telemetry, but hangs and freezes aren't. Random performance issues, glitches, etc... are in the same bucket of permanently invisible issues.
If you're wondering why Windows is crashing less but glitching more... there's your answer.