This will be one of the rare occurrences where someone is asking "why does my program work?", not "why doesn't it?"
We recently moved our C++ executables to the VS22 v143 platform toolset. We are still running C++17 though. Our deployment process packages the most recent redistributable VC143_redist.x64.exe, and VC143_redist.x86.exe. (v14.32.31332.0).
We fully expected that the installation process would have triggered the updated redistributable to execute, but it did not. Stranger still, the executables seem to work fine. The test team has confirmed that they are running with C++ 2010 10.0.30319 and C++ 2015-2019 14.22.27821.0 (x86 and x64 for both).
So my question is: how is the executable working? Is there more than just the compiler version at play here?