Yes, however, it will expand the runtime into C:\temp (or similar). What could go wrong? And then you find yourself in a MS induced yack shave because you want to run two different executables. Microsoft is a never ending source of accidental complexity.

In this particular scenario, my first thought was "shoulda used golang".

I hear tell that since then (1+ yrs ago) matters have improved in the realm of MS standalone apps (well, maybe just cmd line apps).

oh, and the exe is round about 65mb compared to a golang ~5 or 6mb

Indeed, that's why it's called a redistributable.