Only if done wrong. They are brilliant in general.

I begrudgingly prefer AppImage to being told to make make install, at this point. You know those little projects that will never go into a standard repo or flatpak. For example, some ham radios used a converter box that hooked up to a Windows 95 PC via serial so you could program its internal memory. Well, none of that shit exists anymore. so some guy somewhere has written a thing to do it with a Raspberry Pi's GPIO. 444 people in the world will ever download and use this software. I'd rather you AppImage that than tell me to git clone make make install.

There are virtually no .exes that are zip files with another extensionm. They are executable binary files and nearly always require a slew of support files (just like Linux binary executables)