Didn't they just publicly make an apology for enshitting Windows over the last years, and committed to go back to building native app?

I understand that project might have started way before the public statement but it really doesn't look good from a PR standpoint.

The Media Player the article about is a fully "native" app though (at least if you count C# as native). The Windows8.x version (Xbox Music) was web tech based; it in turn was a reskin/UI-layer-rewrite of Zune (which was C++), so they've already gone through a whole cycle of native->web->native with this. (The "new" Media Player still identifies as "ZuneMusic" in packaging metadata!)