If I had known better in the 90s, and could afford it, then I probably would have dual booted NT4 and Win95 on my home PC, using the latter only for games. Only Win2k would make that obsolete.
NT4 was commonly used for most computers I saw in college. I didn't see much WIn2k.
We also used NT4 at work in the early 2000s. They had a few people on XP but most of us continued running NT4 (desktops) or Win98 (laptops). Upgrading to XP would have required a lot of hardware upgrades, plus the licenses.
They were using Win98 on laptops because they thought the power management features were more important than stability. I did not agree, but I had a desktop (NT4) so I didn't have to suffer.
For practical usage I greatly prefer NT4 to Win9x. It's stable, about as fast as Win95, and has better features than 95 (maybe not 98), but it does need more memory. The only good use case for Win9x is games (and that's obviously our priority here most of the time). I'm still scarred by memories of WIn9x making me want to gouge my eyes out. NT4 is reliable.
The major (non-gaming) feature lacking from NT4 is USB support, which is a bigger deal now than it was back then. I don't remember if there's a fix for that, I never tried myself.
NT4 can be patched to use the Win98 style GUI, but that GUI is slower, just like in Win98. After that slowdown you might as well run Win2k IMO.
My basic way of seeing it is that if a system is suitable for Win95 then it should run NT4, and if it's suitable for Win98 then it should run Win2k. Just add RAM.
Building non-gaming systems with WIn95 hardware doesn't come up much anymore, but I've done this with a couple Pentium laptops that are used for niche purposes.