Maybe some of those variations are due to running the same Excel on different versions of Windows, and it conforming to what it thinks native looks like on each. It's hard to tell.
This isn’t quite fair — as far as I can see, most of the dialogs use precisely the same GUI framework, running on different OS versions. It seems reasonable to expect the GUI style to have changed between one version and the next.
Of course, nothing is quite so simple: the exceptions to this are the very latest versions of Excel, which use some sort of weird hybrid UWP-esque dialog thingy. Is this ‘native’? It depends on how you use the word, but it definitely seems quite different to Win32 or WinForms-style dialogs.
But even so, I’d still argue that it’s wrong to call the word ‘native’ meaningless on Windows. There definitely exist some GUI libraries which are endorsed by Microsoft and have greater integration with the OS. As you note, it can be quite difficult for the user to tell by look alone which library is used for any particular application, but that doesn’t mean there are no benefits to using a native GUI — the integration with the OS is important. For instance, I use a custom keyboard layout; generally I find this works fine with native GUIs, but non-native ones don’t support it very well (with the notable exception of Qt). And that may be a somewhat niche example, but one can imagine many other preferences which non-native GUIs might not respect: accessibility, dark mode and border colours are three I can think of, and I’m sure there are more.
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This isn’t quite fair — as far as I can see, most of the dialogs use precisely the same GUI framework, running on different OS versions. It seems reasonable to expect the GUI style to have changed between one version and the next.
Of course, nothing is quite so simple: the exceptions to this are the very latest versions of Excel, which use some sort of weird hybrid UWP-esque dialog thingy. Is this ‘native’? It depends on how you use the word, but it definitely seems quite different to Win32 or WinForms-style dialogs.
But even so, I’d still argue that it’s wrong to call the word ‘native’ meaningless on Windows. There definitely exist some GUI libraries which are endorsed by Microsoft and have greater integration with the OS. As you note, it can be quite difficult for the user to tell by look alone which library is used for any particular application, but that doesn’t mean there are no benefits to using a native GUI — the integration with the OS is important. For instance, I use a custom keyboard layout; generally I find this works fine with native GUIs, but non-native ones don’t support it very well (with the notable exception of Qt). And that may be a somewhat niche example, but one can imagine many other preferences which non-native GUIs might not respect: accessibility, dark mode and border colours are three I can think of, and I’m sure there are more.