So many devs are too young to remember a time before you would expect to just download some open source and compile it for x86/amd64/arm/emscripten/etc and be good to go. In the old days, if you didn't want to write that library code yourself, chances are all your AltaVista search would turn up was a guy selling a header file and a DLL and OCX[0] for $25. If you were lucky!

A vast amount of code was only intended to compile and run on a single OS and architecture (circa 2000, that was usually x86 Win32; Unix was dying and Wintel had taken over the world). If some code needed to be ported to another platform, it was as good as a from-scratch re-write.

[0] in case you wanted to use the thing in Visual Basic, which you very well might.

>In 2000 Intel had a huge software moat

"had". That's what helped prop up their monopoly but it didn't last. These days if can't run your software on another architecture, like ARM, you can run at least on AMD. AMD can basically run the same software as Intel. This isn't the situation for NVIDIA vs everyone else, so far.