[spogbiper]

Windows has managed to maintain an amazing amount of backwards compatibility. Sometimes that means decisions that seem odd at surface level. I would not be surprised if there is some corner case where changing the current behavior means something else breaks.

[cosmotic]

If anything, I would guess it's some silly outdated but codified ISO standard that propagated far and wide and entered contractual obligations, like passwords needing to be changed every 3 months.