By "modern OSes" here, are we talking GNU/Linux, which is older than NT and modeled after a system designed in the 60s? Or maybe macOS os iOS, whose foundations are found in FreeBSD, released in the same year as NT and with a direct lineage to that system from the 60s, plus a kernel from 1985? Using the word "modern" to describe Linux and the BSDs but not Windows NT strikes me as odd...
Now I use and like Linux and macOS and iOS, and I strongly dislike Windows. But I don't think I would find it difficult to find advantages to NT's approaches to certain problems over the UNIX-style approach to the same problems. For example, the idea that pipes send structured objects rather than text is interesting and has definitive advantages (and disadvantages) compared to UNIX's text-based pipe model. Its filesystem permissions layer is also way more flexible than UNIX's, with hooks for arbitrary programs to inspect file accesses, which has advantages (and disadvantages). And its GUI-first approach to everything, where everything is primarily configured through some GUI rather than a command line or text file, has obvious advantages (and disadvantages). And although I don't understand it very well (again, not a Windows user), what I hear from HyperV is pretty cool.
NT is super interesting as the only serious alternative to UNIX-style systems. There is value in studying it, even if I find the overall experience provided by Windows to be much, much worse than my Fedora desktop or my macOS laptop.
NT has no notion of pipes that send structured objects, but it does have Unix-like pipes.
Maybe you are thinking about Powershell. Powershell is interesting (although in practice I find it not very practical to use), but is quite another subject than NT. It's really also its own segregated world, that relies on dotnet, that is really another platform than NT (although in the first place implemented on top of it, and of course there are some integrations)
Windows ACL are powerful in theory but hard to manage in practice. Look at this fine textual representation for example: "O:AOG:DAD:(A;;RPWPCCDCLCSWRCWDWOGA;;;S-1-0-0)". Hum; at least ugo+-rwx you can remember it, and actually POSIX ACL are also easier to remember than Windows ACL.
Windows NT is not even that much GUI first. There are tons of things that you just can't access through a GUI, let alone a user friendly GUI. Funny example: ACLs on tasks from the Task Scheduler: no GUI access at all. It would probably not even be too hard for MS to plug their standard permission Window so that you can access them with the GUI, but they never did it. So much for the GUI first. Oh, I'm not even sure it has a command line interface to set the ACL there. Maybe just the Win32 API.
I also don't think there is an integrated Windows tool to view for examples the processes in a tree, even less to show Win32 jobs.
HyperV by itself has nothing revolutionary but there are a few interesting ideas that it can bring when integrated in a few Windows component (some security related sadly reserved to Entreprise version, because it is well known that in 2024 making good security architecture unreachable from the general public and SME is a brilliant idea). But compared to Qubes OS for example, it is very little. Oh there are also no Windows GUI to show HyperV states for these integration (as opposed with regular full system VMs)
Now I still think there are a few good ideas in NT, but the low level layers are actually not that far from Unix systems. It's closer than Cutler would admit. (In particular, there are not so much differences between "everything is a "file"" and "everything is an "object"", at least when you look at what Linux as done about "everything is a "file"" -- this is quite ironic because Cutler particularly disliked the "everything is a "file"" idea)
Now I use and like Linux and macOS and iOS, and I strongly dislike Windows. But I don't think I would find it difficult to find advantages to NT's approaches to certain problems over the UNIX-style approach to the same problems. For example, the idea that pipes send structured objects rather than text is interesting and has definitive advantages (and disadvantages) compared to UNIX's text-based pipe model. Its filesystem permissions layer is also way more flexible than UNIX's, with hooks for arbitrary programs to inspect file accesses, which has advantages (and disadvantages). And its GUI-first approach to everything, where everything is primarily configured through some GUI rather than a command line or text file, has obvious advantages (and disadvantages). And although I don't understand it very well (again, not a Windows user), what I hear from HyperV is pretty cool.
NT is super interesting as the only serious alternative to UNIX-style systems. There is value in studying it, even if I find the overall experience provided by Windows to be much, much worse than my Fedora desktop or my macOS laptop.