Windows 11 adds native support for RAR, 7-Zip, Tar and other archive formats thanks to open-source library

Ok, you have this design, which every installer in the world uses. Some are more compressed, some are signed, some bootstrap a downloader - but at the end of the day, every downloadable installer uses the same basic concept. From Windows installers to dmg to flatpacks to app bundles - same basic idea.

A tarball is a bunch of files laid end to end, it's good for one thing and one thing only - treating a bunch of files as one. It's great at that... If you want to compress it, it's not context aware enough to let you decrepit them individually - they're encrypted as one file

It's a bad way to store compressed archived info, I'll grant you that, but it's a great way to share a program or library to reproduce a bunch of files that make no sense to handle individually.

For another example, what about the layers of a photo editing program? What about the individual tracks in a music editing program?

It's an incredibly useful pattern that is used in countless ways. It's simple, easy to implement, and used everywhere to great effect