" Or checking the Windows version with a "9x" wildcard, giving us the jump from W8 to W10 over a decade later."
This is just a rumor made up on reddit. It's completely false. Windows returns its version number as a series of integers. And even if it was a string, they could've just called it "Windows Nine".
Windows version APIs have always had a "name" string and bad developers do have a wild tendency to just use string manipulation instead of more obvious methods. The Windows version APIs now even "lie" by default since around Vista because they presume a developer isn't querying the version API for the right reasons and you now have to essentially tell Windows you are built for/have tested on the right version to get the right version response, but the right way to do things is capability checks rather than checking the version API so it shouldn't matter that you need to do a lot of work to get the actual current version information from the version API.
