Jfl at still using bloated proprietary spyware.
1). I don't know why you would go out and get Windows 11 considering that you need a modern and high-specked system to run it, takes up half of your RAM while idle, and it's just proprietary bloatware full of spyware and whatever else Microsoft puts on there that you don't know about. Hell, they even make it mandatory to create a user account online via Microsoft Account instead of making a local user. Still has all the problems of older Windows versions.
2) Windows 2000, Windows XP and even Windows 7 were at least good. Too bad they're unsupported.
3) You don't have to support older applications if you keep your Linux system up to date. Just recompile against your existing libraries. Windows forces updates anyways and then to update each separate installed application is inconsistent. On Linux everything is organized in the file system (/usr/bin for applications /usr/lib for libraries, etc) whereas on Windows each application has its own folder creating redundancy of shared libraries.
4) If you want bloat then you install a bloated window manager like GNOME or KDE. But Linux gives choice over your desktop and resources, and you can even choose a much lighter environment like Xfce if you don't mind an ultra-modern look and you can still customize it to make it look nice and run on much older computers. Hell, if you got a PC from the 90s you can still put twm or WindowMaker on it.