And when someone installs some obscure or outdated and vulnerable codec on these systems, it's then automatically exposed to all sorts of applications to exploit. Maybe Windows sandboxes that these days(?) It was definitely a problem in the past.
No perfect solutions here; both "system-wide codecs" and "every application brings their own codecs" have their own up- and downsides.
Besides, with ffmpeg and gstreamer the system-wide codecs paradigm also works on Linux.
This is one of those "it's different but it doesn't really matter much" type of things. Most people "just" install vlc or mpv or whatnot and things will "just work" for them, not really different from Windows. That it's technically slightly different is almost entirely transparent to the user.
No perfect solutions here; both "system-wide codecs" and "every application brings their own codecs" have their own up- and downsides.
Besides, with ffmpeg and gstreamer the system-wide codecs paradigm also works on Linux.
This is one of those "it's different but it doesn't really matter much" type of things. Most people "just" install vlc or mpv or whatnot and things will "just work" for them, not really different from Windows. That it's technically slightly different is almost entirely transparent to the user.