I think PowerToys are sort of a testing/QA playground. Features from PowerToys are sometimes adopted into Windows.

Including it in the OS is a much bigger support commitment.

Yep. I, for one, am certainly glad that PowerToys are separate and they can be updated/iterated upon more often.

They're really good at keeping out functional bloat, not so much with ad and telemetry bloat.

Marketing driven development, its the best programming approach.

"power" as in Power-user... A lot of power user tools aren't typically installed in consumer oriented OSes, see MacOS and Windows.

Beyond this, PowerToys can take third party contributions and evolve far faster/easier than Windows official release software.

I wish they removed a lot from Windows... for a consumer user. Installing Prof/Enterprise editions and there is still bloatware installed, it is so unappealing!

Every thread about windows has everyone moaning about bloat. Some tools from the Powertoys Suite are usable, but the whole thing is incredibly clunky and slow even compared to the React native infested Windows 11

I've wondered that same thing for the last 30 years.

They would have to support it for 20 years or more.