Win32 resources are much more than that. They have names and type information associated with them, and they can be multilingual (see e.g. [0]). A rich runtime API is provided to dynamically find and load resources from executables/libraries. You can distribute a resource library that other programs can statically link in or dynamically load. Basically, it’s an ABI for resources, including localization support and a schema for UI-related resource types.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/...