I assume that some variant of "bundled Windows Runtime" is the reason why trial versions of various of various productivity SW that came with my first PC had MZ

I assume that some variant of "bundled Windows Runtime" is the reason why trial versions of various of various productivity SW that came with my first PC had MZ stubs, that didn't print "This program requires Microsoft Windows", but EXEC'd something like "%COMSPEC% /C WIN.COM PROGRAM.EXE"