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WinRAR's strong point is support for RAR archives, not ZIP which has been natively supported in Windows for years (since XP?).

I think Windows 11 got native RAR and 7Z support recently but I'm not sure what libraries it uses for this.

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Sort of, the "zip folder" thing was introduced with the "98 Plus!" pack, but came natively with XP. That said, "natively supported in Windows" is one thing, but the usability was... well, not great. The entire "it's a compressed folder!" analogy seems reasonable, but the implementation wasn't. It ate memory like few other components, crashed often, and because it was treated like a folder only in file explorer the analogy quickly broke down when using a file picker anywhere else. WinZIP and WinRAR were basically requirements if you often worked with zip archives until 7zip came along and did everything just a tad better.

Windows 11 uses libarchive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libarchive#Users

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