I'd say that of course people at Microsoft thought to do this, twenty years prior at the time of OS/2 1.0 …

… except that it might have been people from IBM. OS/2 had a DosGetMessage() API function that looked up messages in a compiled message file and inserted strings taken from an application-supplied array wherever a %1 to a %9 occurred in the message.

It was regularly used to edit the applicable filename, drive letter, numeric values, or whatnot into error messages.