Somebody needs to find whoever was responsible for the original NT task manager and learn a thing or two. That thing was bulletproof. I had servers over the years that were so broken nothing else would run but you hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and tada!
David Plummer, he has a YouTube channel "Dave's garage" he has a couple of videos dedicated to Taskmanager and even a look at the source for his first version. That and other cool stuff on windows and other tech.
for the love of god, for the past 27 years it's been ctrl-shift-esc (since like NT 4.0), while ctrl-alt-del opens up the security menu thing. I can't believe I'm saying this..
CTRL+SHIFT+ESC is simply a keyboard shortcut and is useless on a locked up system, it dies with the shell. CTRL+ALT+DEL throws a hardware interrupt, which contributed to the aforementioned bulletproof nature.
Real talk though, how long ago was that? Linux has been making improvements at a blistering pace. If it's been a while, I'd recommend giving it another try soon.
There is a developer setting that enables "kill task" in the task bar right-click menu. I recommend enabling it. I believe this is new since I just found out about it. It may only be in Windows Insider Dev Channel and/or Windows 11 Enterprise version, I'm not sure.