What would replace it? Thousands of individual config files? That's a mess to manage.
What the Windows Registry needs is a REST API.
What the Windows Registry needs is a REST API.
That's not necessarily true.
In the 90's I worked at a large telco where we'd gotten good user roaming functionality along with package management using third party tools, for about 1600 applications, on Windows 3.
Uninstalling a package demonstrably left no remnants behind.
The migration to Windows 95 was troublesome partly because it was much harder for roaming users, but mostly the registry was much more difficult to manage - Office applications were notably impolite, with thousands of registry entries, many of which lingered after an uninstall, and no way to sanitise the registry other than reinstalling the OS.
If you're using a computer without a package management system I could see how you could be convinced config files are harder to manage (by hand) than an opaque blob that poorly hides its ugliness, but you'd have bigger problems.
shudders
Why would you want a networked API for stuff that should be internal to the machine?