The vendor who makes the software has always written for Windows (or in reality, wrote for either DOS or OS/2 then transitioned to NT4). History, momentum, familiarity, cost, and ease of support all are factors (among others, I'm sure).
Security is a process, not a product.
And yes, distros require frequent updates, though more to your point, you can limit the scope of installed software. I'm sure airport displays don't need MPEG2, VP1 and so on codecs, for instance.
It's also important to remember that there is a lot of 'garageware' out there with these specialized systems. Want SAML/OIDC support? We only support LDAP over cleartext, or Active Directory at best. Want the latest and greatest version of Apache Tomcat? Sorry, the vendor doesn't know how to troubleshoot either, so they only "support" a three year old vulnerable version.
Ran into that more than a few times.
Given the hypothesis of what caused the BSOD with Crowdstrike (NUL pointer), using a safe language would have been appropriate -- it's fairly easy in this case to lay the blame with CS.
Microsoft supplies the shotgun. It's the vendors responsibility to point it away from themselves.