You've just done the same thing as the author of the article, only there are Raymond Chen references elsewhere in this thread that contradict your statements.
There was a lot of HW which only had DOS drivers which were loaded prior to starting Windows.
Yes, the Windows kernel took the whole thing further but it still relied on MS-DOS for some things.
TSRs (which amount to "DOS drivers") were notoriously flaky with Win3.1. Some requiring installation prior, some requiring installation inside of a guest DOS shell, some just not working at all. More reliable ones (such as MSCDEX) were explicitly compatible with Win3.1 and its IDT.
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You've just done the same thing as the author of the article, only there are Raymond Chen references elsewhere in this thread that contradict your statements.
Raymond Chen stated that there were different OSs running inside win3.1.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100517-00/?p=14...
There was a lot of HW which only had DOS drivers which were loaded prior to starting Windows. Yes, the Windows kernel took the whole thing further but it still relied on MS-DOS for some things.
TSRs (which amount to "DOS drivers") were notoriously flaky with Win3.1. Some requiring installation prior, some requiring installation inside of a guest DOS shell, some just not working at all. More reliable ones (such as MSCDEX) were explicitly compatible with Win3.1 and its IDT.
https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/vxd/vxd.htm