alt Hacker Newsthis feature probably began life as "automatically download necessary drivers to make installation easier" and then after some massaging the definition of "necessary drivers" expanded to "anything the manufacturer would like to see running on this PC regardless of how necessary it is for the device to function".
Windows downloads the driver first, then the driver itself uses an AddSoftware directive to install a companion app. Which is ok when the app is a GPU control panel or similar, but here it was clearly abused.