Would you define a fake icon as social engineering?

Mac and Gnome do too. I think somehow overlaying that it’s an executable and double-checking if you want to execute from a removable drive might be better techniques than worrying about file extensions which only help people who know what they’re doing already (in which case it’s common to configure the UI to show those extensions)

Color coding any executables in file managers (in an otherwise reserved color) should be a standard.

Copying the "folder" onto the local machine first wouldn't have helped, though. It would still be an executable, and the user would still be enticed to double-click it (because it would still appear to be a folder which the user expected to contain desired files). We could fall back to "allowing the user to use a GUI to select files seems like a very bad idea when they come from the other side of an air gap", but at some point a concession has to be made to usability.

The problems here are to do with how Windows uses and presents file extensions.