> Try writing something like Spotify in WinAPI and that's not even a complicated GUI either.

Fruityloops, now FL Studio, was written in Delphi and to my knowledge still is[1]. When ot launched there were no options but Win32 for Delphi.

That's just one example. Win32 makes it reasonably easy to skin things, and back in the 2000s a lit of programs did.

[1]: https://blogs.embarcadero.com/fl-studio-is-a-massively-popul...

Spotify would be remarkably improved if it became a simple enough gui to be excluded from this conversation.

WinAmp was the win32 music player of choice, once upon a time.

Most apps at the time managed that quite successfully. IIRC Adobe Photoshop was an MFC app. There was no other API but Win32 API.