Instability aside, Windows 98 marked the point where Internet Explorer leeched itself into the operating system to the point of no return (only to be finally reversed in the past year). The complaints of social media apps being "preinstalled" with Windows 11 seem to echo the channel bar, Active Desktop and everything else that arrived with IE4. I believe that the notion that Windows 98 was good came when IE5 were released and pulled back on some of those integrations, which happened to coincide with the timing of 98 Second Edition. In any case it was by no means great, but it was good enough.