I remember the default media player that shipped on Windows was absolutely terrible because it could only play a very limited number of file formats, none of which were actually used much by movie files found in the wild. If you wanted to actually play a video, you had to try your luck and choose among several 3p "codec packs" half of which were probably loaded with malware.

People who have always lived in a world with great software like VLC and MPV and ffmpeg underestimate how hard it was to actually play a video file on your computer back in 2000.