There's plenty of good reasons to bash Microsoft, but 'lack of backwards compatibility' just isn't one of them. If anything, I think their obsession with backwards compatibility drove a lot of compromised design decisions at that company.
IMO they are making their life a lot harder by introducing all those frameworks and platforms every five years or so, but despite that they still make sure that stuff keeps working.
That's the official answer. The more nuanced and correct answer is that DOS (16-bit realmode) apps won't work due to the hardware lacking the functionality --- blame AMD, not Microsoft, for that --- but there's no such limitation for Win16 (16-bit protected mode) apps. Thus, WINE on a 64-bit Linux will handle 64, 32, and 16-bit Windows apps, and there's no emulation unlike with DOSbox and such:
https://www.dkia.at/en/node/180
(Coincidentally, I recently made a comment on another article about the nuanced nature of the word "supported": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19578503 )
Considering that, it's no surprise that 16-bit Windows apps would no longer run on 64-bit Windows, especially since NTVDM was necessary to run them on 32-bit NT based versions of Windows anyway.