You're mostly correct. People here don't take Windows praise lightly.
NT is probably the best part about Windows. If you're gonna complain about Windows, the kernel is the last thing to complain about.
As you've said, there are things that are still better about NT to this day;
- OOM conditions are way better - system continues to run mostly fine after emergency swapping memory pages into the page file. No crashes, just a freeze until the OS swaps stuff out. No data is usually lost due to this. Apps continue to run and you have the chance to save and reboot your machine.
- The driver architecture, as you've alluded to, is much more flexible. No need to rebuild a DKMS module every time the kernel updates. The drivers are self-contained and best of all - backwards compatible. You can still use XP 64-bit drivers on modern Windows (if you ever need to)
- Process scheduling is very good for anything equal to or lower than 64 CPU threads. Windows at its core can multitask pretty good on one thread and that scales up to a certain point.
Most of NT stigma comes from NTFS (which has its own share of problems) and the bugcheck screens that people kept seeing (which weren't even mostly MS' fault to begin with, that was on the driver vendors).
Mark Russinovich has some of his old talks up on his YT channel and one of them compares Linux (2.6 at the time) to NT and goes into great detail. Most of the points made there still applies to this day.
Konami code will summon an option and basically turn the craft into Gradius.
Highly recommended.