You’d be surprised to know, that in a majority of the cases of NT installations in that era, providing services, there were very, very few admins around to even notice what was going on. Running services like this on an NT box was done ‘in order to not have to have an admin’, in so many thousands of cases, it cannot be underestimated.

Disclaimer: I put a lot of servers on the Internet in the 90’s/early 2000’s. It was industry-wide standard practice: ‘use NT so you don’t need an admin’.