I don't know about Mac, but windows had WPF, winforms, UWP - all blessed by microsoft (I'm sure I'm missing a few), and often maintained at the same time.
A huge amount of windows apps were built with Java, you had to install the JDK separately - one such thing that comes to mind is Minecraft, another is Jetbrains IDE.
Most of the major native apps you use most often, like browsers, render things directly using DirectX and similar, not to mention games which are made almost entirely in third-party engines that are far from Microsoft display frameworks.
(There are also 2-3 competitors to DirectX - such as Vulcan and OpenGL )
And of course there are quite a lot of popular apps that use other frameworks like QT
I concur that Windows has always been a mess, but at any given point, wasn’t one of those things the “prescribed way” of doings things? Like, I get that Win32 is never going away, and some of the ideas were busts.
The Java phase I think is more analogous to modern React Native and Electron apps.
They were newer. I don't know if they were prescribed.
It took a long time for newer frameworks to reach feature parity
and even longer to get deprecated.
Microsoft would routinely suggest both, I think there were articles in MSN showing how to do stuff with each side by side. Like programming language flavors.
Linux is even more of a mess I imagine. I think Mac, and especially iOS, were the odd ones out. The Apple ecosystem is built on making sure everyone does things their way. And that translates to having one blessed framework you must use.
A huge amount of windows apps were built with Java, you had to install the JDK separately - one such thing that comes to mind is Minecraft, another is Jetbrains IDE.
Most of the major native apps you use most often, like browsers, render things directly using DirectX and similar, not to mention games which are made almost entirely in third-party engines that are far from Microsoft display frameworks. (There are also 2-3 competitors to DirectX - such as Vulcan and OpenGL )
And of course there are quite a lot of popular apps that use other frameworks like QT