what surprised me is how different the rendering architecture is for each framework.
Win32 -> message loops & GDI
Winforms -> managed C# via P/Invoke
WPF -> throwse all away and uses DirectX
UWP -> Appcontainer sandboxing
WinUI -> decouples from OS entirely
This visual breakdown helped me to see it clearly - https://vectree.io/c/evolution-of-windows-gui-frameworks-fro...
As far as I remember, WinForms is just a thin wrapper around Win32 with a message loop, i.e. not all that different.