It wasn't just bundled, it was tightly integrated. You could not easily remove it for a period of time, especially if you were the average user.

And, dusting off some old complaints, I seem to recall it was part of a strategy to control not just the browsing experience but also the hosting and serving of web pages. https://www.howtogeek.com/717016/remembering-activex-controls-the-webs-biggest-mistake/

ActiveX was a Microsoft technology that ran best in Internet Explorer on Windows. There were some plug-ins that added support to competing browsers, like Netscape Navigator (the ancestor of Mozilla Firefox), but it was really all about Internet Explorer.

Technically, ActiveX was cross-platform. Microsoft added ActiveX support to Internet Explorer for Mac. However, unlike with Java (which was cross-platform), ActiveX controls written for Windows would not work on a Mac. Developers would have to create ActiveX controls for the Mac.

For example, South Korea standardized on an ActiveX control that was required to access secure financial and government websites back in the '90s. It was only fully shut down in 2020, and dependency on ActiveX forced people to use that ancient, outdated technology for a long time. As the Washington Post once wrote, "South Korea [was] stuck with Internet Explorer for online shopping" in 2013. The article describes how Mac users had to rely on desktop computers in their offices, internet cafes, old computers, or Boot Camp to make purchases online.

Such situations played out in similar ways in other places: Companies that standardized on ActiveX for delivering internal applications were stuck depending on Internet Explorer on Windows until they left ActiveX behind.

It was all about locking you into Microsoft in any possible way. (sounds familiar)

Netscape did not have, and never was anywhere close to having, the sort of weight MS did to throw around.

MS has always been about doing whatever they can do to lock you tightly to their ecosystem, ethics be damned. Before they applied EEE to Linux, they first tried applying it to the web and a bunch of other stuff.