On Windows, it's amazing how confusing permissions are.
Seemingly everything needs admin permission to run. If the program can't get admin permission from you, it can probably just ignore that and do stuff like install to %appdata%. Chrome does this, for example, apparently to fix a bug where work place administrators didn't want their users installing programs with administrative permission. Chrome or anyone else can just fix that bug by using a windows-level exploit feature.
You can never really be sure what's happening when you install a mystery .exe file until you just install it. Sometimes you can exploit things with hack tools to take a peak inside I guess, but that doesn't seem to work very well most of the time in my opinion.
This horrible permission management system is why a lot of games only work on Windows. If they want to make sure players aren't cheating, the way they do that is by installing root kit level malware. We call that anticheat. It's amazing how that's a standard procedure that can just work on a computer. It also has a history of entitled devs screwing it up big time (Sony) or even doing it very poorly which causes huge performance drops like we see in most modern recent games.
Modern Warfare 2019 crashed and corrupted my OS which was on an encrypted drive. This lead to a 100% data loss for me. I'm 90% sure the root reason to this was the root kit anti cheat bugging out on top of awful coding / performance and bugginess in general we see everywhere in that game.
I don't understand how Windows still works off of you receiving packages at your door and the only way to verify its safety is guess that the timing of your package syncs up with what you ordered and the packaging looks like what you got, and to have hope that the place that packed it wasn't malicious. While nearly all programs do include bombs (unwanted tracking / malware / bad design), usually they're just fairly harmless firecrackers. The only way to open your package up is to put it on the flammable gas pipe in the middle of the house (a left over design from earlier versions of the house) which has a very heavy flaming chainsaw attached to a 1 inch chain.