Genuine question, not being sarcastic: why would someone want/need these downloads?

Lots of workshops, factories, university research labs, etc. still use old machinery that would be a huge waste of money to replace just because the computer that controls it runs Windows 95. In some cases it can't be replaced because the company that created the software, drivers, or IO cards is long gone.

Installing Acid Pro 6 requires Visual Studio Redistributable packages the Microsoft no longer has available.

At least, last I checked.

Historical preservation, retro computing, period-correct hardware setups.

The C++ redistributables are necessary for many programs and, for some reason, recent versions of Windows do not include them all.

There's a tool for blocking selected driver updates that still works on Windows 11. Very handy.

I have a legitimate need to replicate systems that are sometimes very legacy for security research (apps that sit on top, rather than the os itself). Building stuff like a base Windows XP image is easy enough, but sometimes system updates are required - even stuff like iirc tls1.2 isn’t supported in IE6

Imagine you have a 2m$ spectroscope or offset printing machine running windows xp.