A lot of weird things in windows are reflections of the gestalt in the 90's and early 2000. People went all in on all sort of OOP-derived weirdness, like CORBA, COM.
"Plain-Text files for configuration? what do you think we are? savages? no, we need a hierarchical registry! every serious program must use some opaque binary format to store stuff!" seem to be the general animus at that time. Nowadays, even if you really hated the idea of a text files for configuration in your home direction, people would probably do something more straight-forward like using a SQLite db.
Agreed re: some of the Windows "strangeness". I think there was some amount of needlessly "Enterprise" architecting going on at MSFT back in the day.
There were also very practical solutions incorporated to accommodate the constraints of the hardware of the time that come off looking like needless complexity today, too. (There's also, arguably, some laziness in the old binary file formats that were nothing more than dumps of in-memory structures. That's a common story across a ton of old software-- not just MSFT.)
Rob Mensching, who worked at Microsoft on Windows Installer pre-release, has a nice blog post about internals of MSI.[0] He goes into some of the overwrought architecture in MSI, as well as quirks to overcome performance limitations in a world of floppy disk-based distribution and much smaller memory capacities. It's a good read.
"Plain-Text files for configuration? what do you think we are? savages? no, we need a hierarchical registry! every serious program must use some opaque binary format to store stuff!" seem to be the general animus at that time. Nowadays, even if you really hated the idea of a text files for configuration in your home direction, people would probably do something more straight-forward like using a SQLite db.