Yeah exactly ... I want Windows running in Linux, not the other way around, so I actually control the software and the updates!

I actually just tried WINE for the FIRST time (surprisingly, I have been out of the Windows world for so long)

https://www.winehq.org/

And as long as I installed the binaries from their repo, not Debian 12, it worked very well

Wine is an impressive project too. It's not a VM, which has upsides and downsides, but I was able to run GCC-TDM, Python 3, and git bash in it!