Windows 11's hardware requirements were made to coincide with CPU's that had hardware mitigation for Meltdown and Spectre attacks, as part of their attempt to push the general baseline of security for average users
I've seen this argument from Ms a lot but let's be real, of the ways typical home windows users are compromised spectre isn't a thing, and isn't hasn't done a thing about, for example, how readily windows let's attackers make a script look like an image .
Also meant to call out the irony of your "MP3.EXE" example earlier. Whose bright idea was it to use DOS-era file extensions to drive executable functionality, then hide those extensions from the user by default? That would be Microsoft. The bad guys just took advantage of their lack of actual cybersecurity horse sense.
The paranoid stupidity surrounding forced Spectre and Meltdown mitigations, whose carbon footprint is probably getting close to that of Bitcoin at this point, is just another example.