You've pretty much got it. It's bad, but it's not horrible. Trying to execute some random file such as a texture basically just doesn't work.. but only by luck. It's possible, but unlikely that the data might look enough like an actual program to run and do something unpredictable.

I'm not aware of any major reasons why its a problem to make everything as executable (and I know that when I open an NTFS drive from linux, all the files are executable by default - because NTFS doesn't have that flag). From my point of view I just think its sloppy. I figure it can't be hard for GOG to just correctly identify which files are meant to be executable. For most games its just a single executable file - the same one that GOG's script is launching. And presumably the files that developers provided GOG have the correct flags in the first place.

Anyway, not really a big deal. Like I said, I just think it's a bit low-effort.

[–] emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 14 hours ago

Yeah that's fair, and im not defending the practice, it just made me think of some games that Ive seen that have multiple executables, usually with an inbuilt launcher that i have to bypass. Or when games used to come with a dx11 and dx12 executable. Personally i find that in itself super sloppy and annoying as well, but it makes a kind of lazy sense to just apply it to all the game files, in that its just one less thing to have to change if you make an alteration to the name of the executable file or add a new executable for whatever reason. Just one less possible failure point. But yeah I can see how its definitely not best practice.