The computer I'm writing this on, the earliest things showing in Control Panel were installed in February 2012. It's not a rarely used clean machine, it's a daily use home computer/plaything with a lot of stuff installed/removed over the years from application suites to dev environments and esolangs, to editors, viewers, inspectors, emulators, hypervisors, browsers, chat and streaming clients, game stores, networking tools.
That's not a reason for why I didn't need to wipe and fresh install Windows in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, which was what qingcharles was claiming he had to do.
Why wouldn't it still work?