For a long time it was the only graphical user-friendly option for non-technical Windows users that had decent support for a wide range of formats. I don’t know about its early years, but friends, family and I have been using it for a good 15+ years without encountering the issues folks are describing in these comments.

It seems there’s a lot of open-source lovers that haven’t also accepted that bugs can get fixed, projects can improve, etc. They’d rather treat a project as though it was stuck at version 0 from 20 something years ago. Deeply ironic.