aplay doesn’t bitch about encodings or signatures or checksums or something not looking like a media file. If you do something stupid (like pipe an executable file into it), it won’t tell you to go back to the child-safe play pen, it will pass the data to ALSA and do its best to render it as sound.

The Windows mind can’t comprehend the importance of the freedom to fuck around. But, looking at your comment history, you’re more of a professional contrarian and won’t even try to do that.