These may be less infected, but, at the least, 8.0 is vulnerable to the more pernicious crap like the FBI Moneypak ransomware. And once its on, it is a lot harder to eradicate than with any of the preceding versions.

Safe Mode is disabled by default. Turning it on after something bad has happened is an adventure. And UEFI makes booting an external OS impossible unless the hardware provides the option to switch to legacy BIOS. Very lovely. (And at the moment, the tools that will usually clean up the older versions are likely to not work on 8.)