If you can't believe 'articles' then how about personal experience?
Experience, trumps guesswork and articles every time.
Since 2005, the only ones of my customers who have upgraded from XP to a newer OS are the ones that had their old XP PC crash on them and they went to a local retail store and bought a new computer, oblivious to what OS was on it. Then it was my job to try to make the new PC look and act as much like XP as possible. I can do that!
One local retail store manager told me that about 30% of people buying new PC's with Windows 8 or 8.1, bring them back in total disgust.
The bottom line is, that the new OS's are just not popular with the rank and file of computer users. Those are the home PC users that don't come to forums, or show up in magazine statistics.
I've been an OS tester on every OS since Windows XP, and out of all of them, I still prefer XP-Pro-SP3, which I'm using right now.
The only OS that may ever replace XP in my life, would be Windows 10. I can make it look and act pretty much like XP, with just a few insignificant differences. And, it comes with an admirable package of hardware drivers. So far, so good!
I've installed it on a ten year old Desktop and a six year old laptop and it's running just fine on both.