I think you're talking about the extraction feature that came with ZIP folders. Aside from being clunky it's also rather inefficient and slow, it doesn't have any provisions for handling issues like mojibake, and is generally just not very robust. So why? AFAIK it's because the ZIP Folders/Visual ZIP code was basically integrated with Windows and then never updated. When it shipped in Windows XP (and possibly earlier, but I don't remember for sure) I think it was perfectly serviceable... it just didn't improve much over time.

I can't really stomach Windows 11 so I don't personally use it but my understanding is that the latest version of Windows 11 has finally integrated a better solution, implementing archive extraction based on libarchive.

>It ships with a very terrible wizard.

Terrible how? It just needs to zip and unzip and it does that fine for most users. What else do you expect for casual users? For power usurers there's 7zip or WinRar or other solutions.

> Maybe I should say, why does the Windows unarchiving feature suck?

And what stopped you from saying that? HN rules say comments should be in good faith. What you said has clearly different meaning than what you say you meant.