MinGW and MinGW-64/MSYS2 are just as inscrutable, fragile and new-user-hostile. The fact that you have to choose between MinGW (which has a 64 bit version) or MinGW64 (completely separate codebases maintained by different people as far as I can tell) is just the first in a long obstacle course of decisions, traps, and unexplained acronyms/product names. There are dozens of different versions, pre-built toolchains and packages to throw you off-course if you choose the wrong one.

If you're just a guy trying to compile a C application on Windows, and you end up on the mingw-w64 downloads page, it's not exactly smooth sailing: https://www.mingw-w64.org/downloads/

Because it's fewer hoops and hurdles than using MinGW, in my experience.

MinGW/MSYS2 are flaming poop hurdles. That’s the bending over backwards to fake a hacky ass bad dev environment. Projects that only support MinGW on Windows are projecting “don’t take windows seriously”.

Supporting Windows without MinGW garbage is really really easy. Only supporting MinGW is saying “I don’t take this platform seriously so you should probably just ignore this project”.