I call bullshit on this post. Since Windows 10 you can just double click a zip file and it opens up like any other directory (even if it isn’t) and shows you the files.
Just the other day I had to tell someone to unzip first before they could patch the rom (they were going to play some romhack on an emulator); I don’t know how old they were but clearly there can be scenarios where someone has a zip file and don’t know what to do with it or use it.
I don’t even know what the rom was or which emulator they were using, because I just told them if they google Rom Patcher JS that’s going to work for whatever file type it is, because according to them the problem was that the patcher they had didn’t work…
But as it turns out they were trying to use the .zip archive as the patch file, so I then had to explain to them that they need to extract it first.
And afterwards the patcher they had did work so I don’t think they even used Rom Patcher JS in the end.
That’s also more of a Windows issue than a user issue. I absolutely hate that file types are hidden by default in file explorer, makes the whole thing feel unusable. First option I change whenever I touch a Windows PC.
So besides the icon you can’t see at first glance as a casual user that it’s a zip file. And a ROM most likely had an icon the user wasn’t used to, so they didn’t notice something was wrong :-/