All that "useless eye-candy" has always been possible to disable if you knew what you're doing
Big "if". Of course, people in the Microsoft Astroturf program have access to that sort of information.
but those visual effects are now an industry standard for most desktop operating systems.
Luckily, in all but two of the "desktop" OSs that I know of, such eye-candy is not merely optional, but of a variety and quality that blows those two "broad market desktops" away. If, of course, that's what you want to spend your CPU cycles on.
Because, in all but two of the "desktop" OSs that I know of, the graphical user interface is just another application. Not part of the core OS at all. That provides a realm of variety, stability and security that Microsoft users cannot even imagine, as they reboot because Internet Explorer has gone unstable again.
Microsoft built its eye-candy into the OS directly, wasting my time disabling what they turn on by default, and making it impossible to optimize my system as anything other than a "broad market desktop".
I am not a "broad market". My system is not a "broad market desktop", neither is yours. Defaults are sometimes a good place to start, what sucks is getting stuck with someone else's defaults.
My preference is choice. I like very much having the choice of what style of "desktop" to use today. Full featured with eye-candy, clean and square (yes, in fact I do like my applications to have square corners), minimalistic without even desktop icons or polling of removable storage. Can't do all that on a "broad market desktop".
Microsoft makes an OS for the broad market, not just people who couldn't afford a new computer for the past five years.
Microsoft deliberately makes an OS that requires near state-of-the-art hardware just to run their eye-candy. If that's what you want to spend your money on, you are more than welcome. 3-D effects work just fine on my ca. 2003 laptop, just not Microsoft's versions of those effects.
It has nothing to do with "couldn't afford", and I find your insulting people who don't have as much money as you do rather typical of what I've read of your opinions.