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

The new options make direct use and management of the (expensive) threads less frequent.

people that, when confronted with a task that involves some kind of parallel execution, jump directly to using the good old Thread class.

Which is a very expensive and relatively complex way of doing stuff in parallel.

Note that the expense matters most: You cannot use a full thread to do a small job, it would be counterproductive. The ThreadPool combats the costs, the Task class the complexities (exceptions, waiting and canceling).