This is fine for parsing command line arguments in your own programs, but unhelpful when attempting to provide a mechanism to reliably pass a user-supplied argument list to an arbitrary external program that is free to interpret the string returned by GetCommandLine arbitrarily (so the notion of "passing a list of arguments" isn't even generally applicable).

cmd.exe is an important and terrible example:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...

Within Microsoft when I was there, it was considered taboo to introduce a dependency to shell32 where it did not already exist. I tried to add a call to CommandLineToArgvW once and it got flagged.

From the part of Microsoft that was focused on cleaning up the windows code base in that era, the shell was not considered a core component. All of the utility functions that it provides like this were considered baggage, improper layering, poor design.