Jason Snell was not only a Mac user 25 years ago, he also covered the Mac perspective of Windows 95 in MacUser. From his brief retrospective on Six Colors:

The magazine I worked at back then, MacUser, decided to offer up as a rejoinder a cover that said “Windows 95: So What?” … Here’s the truth about Windows 95, though: it was devastating to the Mac. Before Windows 95, PCs were spectacularly bad. (Sorry, fans of Windows 3.1, but it was garbage.)

Windows 3.1 was garbage on “why would anyone choose to use this” levels. On a functional level, I would argue Windows 95 wasn’t that much better. Just take a look at these installation instructions from an AOL CD from that era.

1. Insert the AOL CD. If installation begins automatically, proceed directly to step 3.
2. WINDOWS 95 users click on Start on task bar (Win 3.1 users click on the File menu of your Windows Program Manager) then select Run. Type D:\SETUP and click OK.
3. MACINTOSH users double-click on the AOL Install icon.

You couldn’t argue Windows 95 could match the user experience of the Macintosh when installing software still required typing a command into Run, but you also couldn’t argue it wasn’t markedly better than what came before. Just look at the list Jason rattles off — “long filenames, trash can¹, aliases, a desktop, easy app switching, the promise of plug-and-play peripherals.”

While modern day macOS has its roots in the original Macintosh System and NeXTSTEP, modern day Windows has its roots in Windows 95. Everything prior has largely been thrown away because even Microsoft knew it was garbage.