I don’t disagree with this statement in general. That days, I don’t know how old you are and whether or not you were really around the home PC space when the auto run feature first came to be. I can sort of understand what Microsoft was trying to accomplish with it… the mid-90’s were a wild, lawless time with regard to personal computing. There was a lot of heartburn on the end user side because things were changing so rapidly. Getting them to understand that what a “drive letter” was, how to get there, and how to run an application from it (let alone what an application even was) proved challenging even under the best circumstances. The ability to insert a CD into the drive tray and have it “just work” (also a big theme in Win 95/98) was a godsend for a lot of publishers.
Of course, in today’s world, we look at that kind of feature and rightly say “yo, that’s fucking crazy, why would you do that?”, but in the old days it really did help. At the end of the day, it was a useful feature that, like a lot of windows legacy crap, was left in the OS after its usefulness had gone and just became another attack vector.