XP hauled ass, admit it!
Vista was far worse. 7 was better than XP. 8 was a return to the garbage bin, 8.1 was an attempt to get out of the bin that didn’t work and 10 was so ‘good’ they had to force it on users.
XP still gets the job done. Text processing and audio processing worked great on 486 100s with Win95.
Compared to other versions of windows maybe. Compared to other OSes? Not so much. It never had a decent batch language for one thing. People forget how horribly bad, unstable and flakey XP was when it came out. It was pretty much unusable IMO until SP2. Even when it finally got stable, it, along with the entire Microsoft Office suite was a virus magnet.
Compared to just about any version of Linux today, it's hopelessly primitive. Even Microsoft's most recent versions are still far behind a modern Linux package management system. The method used to do updates is, frankly insane. Try bringing up a fresh install of Win 7 and see how long it takes, and how many reboots you have to endure to get it up to date on all the patches. I can't really speak to Win 8 or 10 on that, but expect it's little different.