"Microsoft" is not some uniform entity. The people who perpetrated this mis-design aren't necessarily related to the decision makers who steered IE/Office/Windows to have the EEE behavior.
Not a uniform entity, but a real entity with real habits of behavior. You don't have to attribute any malice to the "people who perpetrated this mis-design", Microsoft's bureaucratic structure might just be designed in a way that EEE strategies arise organically. If they people who drove the use of that strategy with older software were rewarded, and held up as examples within the organization, their ideas could be permanently embeded in the nature of the organization itself.
My guess is that they wanted to keep onboarding easier for Linux types (Embrace) by creating an implementation they thought would handle the typical use case (like ls and the like) using a wrapper for their Invoke-WebRequest.
Unfortunately, they've now created a problem in that they need to modify things to prevent users of real curl from getting hosed but at the same time not breaking the Invoke-WebRequest wrapper.
But the goal of something like this may be no more nefarious than, say, Xamarin or similar where the goal is for reuse across systems.
Do we think Invoke-WebRequest is going to somehow become the new standard for curl functionality? Do we think Microsoft has any intention of that coming to fruition?
I imagine if they wanted curl for the sake of curl, they'd have included it (with attribution in some text file), and then parsed the results back into the object format preferred by PowerShell. Instead, it seems more like a stopgap to prevent people from having to totally rewrite their shell scripts to work in Windows as there was enough moaning over PowerShell at launch as yet another shell. Being completely incompatible with users potentially existing scripts? That'd be a big negative and honestly, a move the old Microsoft would've done without a doubt.
Personally, I'd prefer (and maybe it is this way, I don't use PowerShell) that if there is some type of text editor w/ Intellisense that if it saw a curl request it would give an error/warning (warning at the very least if you're going to do the alias thing) telling the user to read the Invoke-WebRequest API (and if it is something that they're currently mapping, offer replacing the curl statement with the IWR equivalent).
Seems the curl author's issue is primarily in that the alias created a situation where he receives false issue tickets (and don't get me wrong, that is terrible) due to the user thinking they're using curl when, in fact, they're not. And honestly, I could completely see where the user would be confused.
So back to the initial question, I don't see malice here. If they rewrote to include every piece of curl functionality and then went above that, then yeah, I'm with you. I do, however, see where someone screwed up royally (both in the initial shortsighted action and also in the headache it now creates for the PowerShell team in addressing w/o breaking for current users who knowingly/unknowingly are using the alias). I think that counts as stupidity.
