mrbigmouth502

why does it need to accommodate compatibility for archaic devices/software?

Because that’s one of Windows’ selling points. It has unusually good backwards compatibility for a mainstream operating system. Compare that to iOS, Android, MacOS, or Linux, where the infrastructure needed to run older binaries often doesn’t exist in the first place.

Linux is a weird case, because thanks to Wine, it actually runs a lot of old games better than Windows, but this doesn’t do anything to help compatibility with older Linux binaries.