Microsoft has an AppStore too for a long time (and also winget for easy terminal installations). I'm not sure how many users prefer it or know about it though. The culture around Windows is that's search&download is still the obvious way, even though many installers nowadays aren't standalone offline packages but rather downloaders of the last stable version - a little appstore delivery in itself.

And as it's a part of the whole ecosystem, and a storefront, MS Store assumes you have an account that it sometimes asks even if you try to download free apps. I can't tell what exactly, maybe a specific Realtek sound app?, was the sole app that I had a hard time finding outside of it.

I wonder what issue could've prevented download of an exemplar Discord tho - picture seems generated with the weird text on first panel, but whatever, it's for my own curiosity. Since they ferched the list of packages, internet is on, the problem there would be with mirrors configuration/availability, I suppose? I recently encountered that issue (thanks to my government, blocking/being blocked by IP) and learnt about the reflector tool and updating mirrors list, both not having GUI due to rare demand, but it's a nice niche for a small project.