Nope. They've always had a lot of documentation. It's often been crap. I've been developing for MS platforms off and on since Win3.1, and have constantly dealt with cycles of "knowing API function A requires you understand what an X is, linked to function B, which only discusses X in terms of function A.". They write a lot, but it's not good. It's like a Hollywood western set where your at just the fronts of buildings. Lots of them, no depth.
You always have to get a 3rd party book to figure this crap out... if you can find one. And if you're off and on, then you're constantly playing this game every few years.
Frankly the X11 books out of O'Reilly are my standard for "good."
I don't agree with this at all. I spent a solid decade doing predominantly Windows development and I haven't felt the need to buy a book on any Microsoft topic since, like - "learn Visual Basic 5". While they probably had a good stretch of years from like after VS2008 until maybe after VS2015 where the documentation was clearly not a focus, I've never had any trouble learning first-and-foremost from the documentation and have often used MSDN as a good example of not needing to already understand the entire topic to benefit from first-party documentation on that topic.
You always have to get a 3rd party book to figure this crap out... if you can find one. And if you're off and on, then you're constantly playing this game every few years.
Frankly the X11 books out of O'Reilly are my standard for "good."