I guess the modern equivalent is a Notion or Obsidian home page. Or a Heimdall dashboard.
I actually miss the feature in XP that let you embed a static HTML page on the desktop desktop. So much potential for customisation out of the box, but instead we have the news widget in W11 which (IMO) is trash.
So it wasn't just me that thought it was an incredibly weird system...
I wondered why or even how anyone would actually use it.