Aside from a centralized, trusted packge archives, with signed packages and vetting, and secure downloads and verification, one difference is that with individual install.exe's - that installer can do whatever it wants. Windows package managers are just a facade over this and just run the installer for you.

An actual Package Manager _is_ the installer - they are part of the OS and know how to correctly install and fully uninstall things. Someone else in this thread wrote a nice summary of this aspect here: https://jmmv.dev/2022/03/a-year-on-windows-winget.html#unins... This part is mostly true with MSI's, they're just a package format like .deb or .rpm - they just don't have any of the other infrastructure around them.

> It does in fact centralize the update flow, but that's only beneficial when you update everything at once, which I don't have any reason to be doing: either I want it on latest, with the only interruption being not quite yet, or I don't want it updating at all

Having this all centralized is actually really nice, so I wouldn't discount that. If you want to pin a package at a particular version, you can and the package manager will leave it alone. If you don't want things updated yet, just don't run the update yet.