I bet AutoCAD will collapse either way if Microsoft decided to purge legacy components from the OS.
I’ve been saying this for years. Their code base is ancient, it’s just makeup on a granma.
The trouble is, I think MS saw through this. Why do you think backwards compatibility suddenly got so good with Win8/8.1/10, while it really sucked with 7 (blue screens all over, especially with drivers from XP). Hell, I’ve installed XP graphics drivers on Win10 x86 LTSC 2019 and everything was hunky dory. Sure, no Nvidia control panel (it just errors out when you try to rum it), but hey, at least they work. Same with software, CorelDRAW 12 was a PITA to get working properly on Win7. On 10, it works out of the box.
I think they were aware that their mobile OS escapades might flop, so they focused on getting better backwards compatibility. If this thing fires back (which it did), stick to your guns, you still are no.1 in the CAD software market.