It's been a long time since I used Windows, but back in the day I used 7-Zip exactly because it could open more or less $anything. That's also why we installed it on many customer computers.
On Linux bsdtar/libarchive gives a similar experience: "tar xf file" works on most things.
7-Zip is like VLC: maybe not the best, but it’s free (speech and beer) and handles almost anything you throw at it. For personal use, I don’t care much about efficient compression either computationally or in terms of storage; I just want “tar, but won’t make a 700 MB blank ISO9660 image take 700 MB”.
Windows 11 has shipped with bsdtar/libarchive for a few years. The gui shell support for archive files was recently changed to use libarchive which has increased the supported archive files which can be opened in the shell.
On Linux bsdtar/libarchive gives a similar experience: "tar xf file" works on most things.