Its also not surprising to anyone who spent time reading Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing blog posts back in the day, a lot of them were about these rather absurd hoops Microsoft was always jumping through to increase backward and forward compatibility with these sorts of tricks.

It may have lead to an unfortunate situation for this developer in this one very niche corner case, but overall it has been wildly beneficial for users over the years (decades even) to have most software Just Work regardless of how deprecated the underlying APIs they were built on are now.