There is no one "Microsoft-approved" way of building GUI applications for Windows (or anything else for that matter), and you're asking for cross platform stuff :-))
The grandparent's comment was pointing out that if you take the default VS setup, which is usually MSBuild, it's quite self contained. As long as you have the corresponding VS redist, you can pretty much pick up an old VS project (one created with VS) and build it. I'm taking even about stuff from 20 years ago.
Cross platform projects use cross platform stuff, which are obviously not developed by Microsoft, so caveat emptor.
By your logic because VS integrates with npm, the issues setting up npm projects are their problem :-p
Op is probably talking about Microsoft compilers and build tools.