Putty has some pretty strange design choices. They coupled the terminal emulator and the SSH client, and (at least used to have) really bad default configuration (blue color was unreadable, windows codepage instead of utf-8, etc. etc.).

Now that Mintty exists, I prefer to use it + openssh on Windows.

Yes, I completely hate some of their decisions on UX/UI

But even with it's flaws, it was always reliably there when I needed it. Had to administer some linux servers with windows machines back on my internship days, and man... that was horrible.

And the config ux is really ...weird.

Yeah, the way you load/save sessions in preferences is very strange. I'm familiar with it now, but I still need to think too much when trying to set up a session.