Before there were scripted alternatives large scale Windows deployments were all imaged because of the hours it took to set up a single machine swapping floppies and writing to spinning rust.

With Windows 7 I was making golden images to simplify deployments.

Even now for the one Windows 10 VM I need for a very specific thing, I couldn't use it without installing AtlasOS (an extensive powershell script to cut out as much of the bloat as possible). Otherwise the system would consistently slow down and stop responding. It was basically unusable (it's running on Proxmox on a considerably old server).