My version of this was the realization that Windows NT Server was not any more suited to being a server, at least not due to any inherent magic.
NT Server was something MSFT could market to enterprise customers for big dollars. It did have meaningful tools for Active Directory and administering a Domain... but if you're a person and not an IT department, it's a safe bet that you'd end up using exactly zero of those tools.
TL;DR: they could have named it Expensive Corporate Seat Licencing Edition.
There was some differences in the registry settings IIRC, the server version simply came with fewer restrictions on the IP stack (i.e. with a bit of regedit hacking, standard NT worked just as well as NT server). There might have been things like needing the server version to run SQL Server as well.
That actually sounds familiar (the SQL server part).
I feel like perhaps they went through awkward contortions of releasing kid glove versions of MSSQL for a while, too. At least before eventually realizing that mySQL was at least as much an existential threat as Oracle was.
NT Server was something MSFT could market to enterprise customers for big dollars. It did have meaningful tools for Active Directory and administering a Domain... but if you're a person and not an IT department, it's a safe bet that you'd end up using exactly zero of those tools.
TL;DR: they could have named it Expensive Corporate Seat Licencing Edition.