Not sure why this is so remarkable. You can find similar assets on Windows buried in explorer.exe or shell32.dll. Hell just poking around my win10 install and I see winhlp32.exe and write.exe sporting their original Windows 3.x icons (though the programs themselves do not function)

My guess is that it's cheapest and lowest-risk to leave them in. It's not like most users are going to encounter them anyway.

The thing is you're comparing the king of backward compatibility with macOS, who is famous for shedding its past at a regular pace.

moricons.dll is also still around. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250507-00/?p=11...