Perhaps, it's about Symantec's failing to validate Microsoft's SHA-2 signatures.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/symantec-cannot-handle-sha-2-and-breaks-windows-7-and-server-2008-r2/

My naive stripping the files in bin and lib of their signatures using https://github.com/ng-pe/RemoveSignCode possibly got me further where I got another error

0xC0000139

STATUS_ENTRYPOINT_NOT_FOUND

The event log had this in the System folder,

mariadbd.exe - Entry Point Not Found

The procedure entry point GetSystemTimePreciseAsFileTime could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll.

See, there is an actual reason why 10.5 msi did not want to install on EOLed Windows. I also think you took unrelated bug report for commenting eelgheez

Sorry to hijack the solved issue. (But the not-in-my-backyard vision of the older Windows versions made me step away from trying MariaDB, sorry. I doubt that getting a system time could not be interpolated for the older Windows).

It is not about getting system time. It is about getting precise system time. We would not use that function GetSystemTimePreciseAsFileTime just for the sake of forcing you off the obsolete Windows version (abandoned by its vendor), because that function is also more expensive than the non-precise variation GetSystemTimeAsFileTime we used previously.