I think Windows 7 was the last Windows OS that it didn't seem like people were begrudgingly moving to. After the flop that was Vista, 7 was touted as "Windows XP, but better." And it more or less delivered on that front. It ran really smooth compared to the then-bloated mess that XP had become, and it was leagues above Vista. Then 8 came along and was such a fumble that it was essentially just "a Vista-level calamity with an even worse UI," and then 10 had so much potential spyware from telemetry that most people didn't want to move over
People just have a more nostalgic view of XP than 7 because it was the first time Microsoft made an OS that wasn't a pain in the ass to get and keep running. Most don't remember that working on a computer pre-XP was far more of a pain in the ass than running pretty much any user-friendly Linux distro today.