As far as I can tell they have actively been working at looking better to developers, at the same time they have had to be essentially forced by public opinion

As far as I can tell they have actively been working at looking better to developers, at the same time they have had to be essentially forced by public opinion to not silently, and by default send your entire life to their server because you used their OS. I know Google does many similar things, and it's as bad, and they probably getting worse. But Microsoft didn't use to do that, they did a lot of suspect things, but not that. So they are also getting worse. They have always tried to woo developers, haven't always succeded, but it's in their DNA. So if that has stayed there all these years, what else have?