Using Classic Outlook on Windows for personal email, calendar, and contact management
I agree. I see this as a "we don't like any of the UX designs we have tried so far" combined with an 80/20 (meaning the "power users" are not a significant enough component of the user base to warrant development teams working on this.
To me, it is indispensable, so I am just on Classic. If (at some point) Classic goes away, I will probably use Thunderbird or eM Client. I basically abandoned em Client (which I paid for) because the calendar integration kept breaking and I spend all day in meetings (please send help) so I need good, integrated calendar ops so back to Outlook.