This is such an ignorant take. The default wallpaper is seen by millions if not billions of people. Many never change it. It's an important part of the branding. The total cost of the shoot, including equipment, salaries, the studio, etc. is NOTHING to Microsoft and its marketing budget. It's not like they had to prioritize this over anything else, they are printing money left and right, they are a trillion dollar company and the default wallpaper is a key aspect of how people see their core product, Windows. It would be disastrous of them to ship with a sub-par wallpaper and in what world would the money "saved" would make a difference to "build a better product"?
Does Microsoft have plenty of money to do anything? Sure. Does the trillion dollar company spend an appropriate effort on the product itself? Certainly not!
The issue is this: From Windows 10 and up, almost every interaction with the UI is a little bit broken, and I could fill pages just describing things that used to work just right in Windows 7 and earlier. It appears the Windows UI is now designed and approved by the visuals only. And now we learn about a disproportionate effort to create a visual.
So it's easy to see how a comment that points out this discrepancy, resonates with everyone who is halfway through their thousand daily cuts of UI punishment.
And yet the best wallpaper they ever used was a lucky fluke by the photographer, who was driving through Sonoma after a rainstorm, in a year where they had to burn the vines off a hillside due to blight infection.
This is like a startup spending hours upon hours on logo and name instead of actually building something.