XAML is the awful part of WPF. The reasoning behind it is understandable, but this whole "declarative ui" thing brings with itself a whole bunch of abstractions

XAML is the awful part of WPF. The reasoning behind it is understandable, but this whole "declarative ui" thing brings with itself a whole bunch of abstractions, like resource dictionaries, styles etc, that you wouldn't need if you do your ui in code. And sometimes code-only wpf is the only way to get good performance from it.