I'm not sure if you're holding up the XP list as being better than the list today, but I bet even the list at that time did not include every random shell extension imaginable.
At the time, there weren’t that many “random shell extensions”. Many of the more common ones were almost certainly there if needed.
My point was you didn’t need to be a “prominent” developer for Microsoft to patch up your app at runtime. This was particularly important for XP, given that it was the big, strategic consumer swap to the NT kernel and had to go smoothly.
