Honestly, I find this to be a lazy trope. MS has certainly laid some eggs before, but the "every other version sucks" narrative relies a lot on revisionist thinking. Vista was a resource hog on the hardware of the time, but the UI was honestly a huge improvement and a lot of the complaining about Vista centered around security improvements the _ABSOLUTELY_ needed to happen. I suspect plenty of HN readers have memories of the malware infested mess that less technical XP users machines often turned into. XP also had an (accidentally) long life, so the XP that was replaced by Vista was significantly improved.
You also leave out 8.1, which was a big improvement on 8.
I'm speaking specifically of initial releases. I recall working on a Vista SP2 machine that I honestly thought was Windows 7 until I looked closer. And 8.1 wasn't too bad. But Vista at release was just awful. It created as many problems as it solved, as did 8.
7 was a success, but mostly it was "Vista with the rough edges ironed out and more time for hardware to catch up". Ditto for 8 and 8.1. So I think it's based on a real phenomenon, where Microsoft was basically unintentionally doing the "move fast and break things" of modern software development, minus the fast part.
Personally, I found Vista's UI to be horrible - the only saving grace was that one could use a "Classic Windows" theme to get back to something useful (as you also could in Win 7). UAC was just awful icing on the horrible cake.
You also leave out 8.1, which was a big improvement on 8.