Windows 7 is still a rock-solid OS and does basically everything that Windows 10 does. And you can download an updates ISO of Windows 7 that includes all updates so that you don't have to download any through Windows Update after installing the OS.
"Unlike Windows 10, that installs all the drivers automatically, I had to install each driver on the netbook, manually."
Windows 7 was the first OS that included a large amount of drivers pre-installed so that hardware would work out of the box. It might not have all the pre-installed drivers that Windows 10 does, but it still has a lot of them. I wouldn't use Windows 10's pre-installed or automatically-downloaded drivers, anyway. They're often out of date or something different than the best one.
Windows 10 is, for the most part, just a reskin of Windows 7. Windows 8 was the same. For reliability and stability, Windows 7 is still a much better OS than Windows 10 is.
The only thing in your installation journal that's actually different than installing Windows 10 is maybe that you installed some additional drivers after the fact. But, then with Windows 7 you don't have to spend an hour or so removing pre-installed bloatware and navigating all the different settings panels to tweak the OS to turn off tons of data-harvesting and other unwanted stuff.
You could have downloaded a 2018-update ISO of Windows 7, including one that has drivers for USB and NVMe already added. Likewise, a person also can install Windows 10 from a 2015 or 2016 ISO and then have to manually install a whole bunch of updates to bring it up to the latest patch. That would be more comparable to your installation of Windows 7.