I’ve mainly used OSX/MacOS tho right out my life, but have used Windows for work. From my understanding, installing an app on Windows scatters files throughout the OS and makes it sometimes difficult to fully uninstall an app. Often times there are files that are leftover.
In macOS it’s super easy because with a lot of apps, the files are bundled within the app itself making it easier to remove.
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It isn’t really a Windows thing; it is a general operating system thing and lazy developers. All you need to do to ‘uninstall’ a program from the perspective of the OS is to unregister some DLLs. You can even run software that isn’t installed at all if the OS has all the dependencies already loaded and all of the files necessary to run the program are in the same folder.
Any developer that writes an uninstall script can remove all the files that came with the program; but they may not want to or it may be risky. A lot of programs that leave behind a lot of traces are complicated softwares that rely on things like the C++ redistributable runtime. At install you may update that program but when you go to uninstall it then it might be a bad idea to clean that off, other programs you install and use may also require that runtime. As the developer of program X, I don’t want my uninstaller to impact the operation of program Y. Dependency hell is not unique to Windows, talk to a linux guy about the ‘prerequistes.txt’ file they will use on install scripts.
Some developers will leave behind configuration files reasoning that the user may want to reinstall the software without having to set up all of their defaults again. A lot of uninstallers will now ask you to do a ‘complete’ uninstall or quick uninstalls that leaves behind stuff.
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