> It definitely was.

Weird that contemporary articles praised its stability then.

> That's one way to say "plagued by a decade of botnets."

No, it’s a way of saying that it introduced real identity-based security isolation to the OS. Prior to this every user had full access to the entire system incisions everyone else’s data who shared the system.

Unfortunately Windows XP was not hardened to the reality of the internet. (Nor were any of its predecessors.)