Yeah I remember. There were 3rd party winsocks and they had compatibility problems. I remember upgrading to 95 and trying to run 3.1 winsock apps. It worked. But it had lots of issues.
I was just pulling out the XP example (a decade newer than 3.1) to illustrate the scale of difficulty one would have. You could literally have the same SChannel binary run on Win11 and WinXP... And the XP one wouldn't be able to talk to the modern internet due to TLS. Obviously the further back in time you go, the more of this type of problem you would have.
For example, Windows XP doesn't support modern and commonly implemented TLS.