All these shady things started happening after he left.

Not really, they have a history of this kind of thing. They just calmed down a little between roughly 2005 and 2015.

The big antitrust case when they killed Netscape was in 1998. Bill Gate’s deposition from that case is kind of interesting to watch as a historical document. It’s on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL90W55zhFBOuZuhgxBsjpgDy0o3ll1PSz

In that lawsuit their “Embrace Extend Extinguish” strategy in which they tried to smother open standards became public too.

They tried with Java and their J++ language too, but failed luckily. And lost a lawsuit against Sun on the way.