This is one of those moments you are surprised to learn when someone has discovered something you just knew.

Freecell was the demo app in Win32s for Windows 3. It is thus several years older than NT as a retail OS.

I have downloaded Win32s and extracted Freecell from it, just to play the game on Win10 LTSC and Win11. Probably more than once in fact.

The default Freecell in 21st century Windows is an ugly blinged-out mess, and in minimal installations, there are no games at all. This is the quick easy way around it.