Are there any cases when it's preferable to use a plain old Thread object instead of one of the newer constructs?

Question

I see a lot of people in blog posts and here on SO either avoiding or advising against the usage of the Thread class in recent versions of C# (and I mean of course

Answer 1

Task and Thread are different abstractions. If you want to model a thread, the Thread class is still the most appropriate choice. E.g. if you need to interact with the current thread, I don't see any better types for this.

However, as you point out .NET has added several dedicated abstractions which are preferable over Thread in many cases.