No, Windows provides a stable ABI for decoding PNG images, it's called the Windows Imaging Components library[1]. I don't think it's sustainable to expect every application to ship effectively an entire distro to provide stability. Consider if my app shipped an old version of gnutls, would you be happy to use that? Should it be my responsibility to update it for eternity? With win32, on both Windows and Linux via Wine, you can just use the win32 bcrypt library and assume the underlying implementation is secure and up to date.

Win32 is the only solution for a usable, stable, application-level ABI on Linux. I don't like that fact either.

[1] See CLSID_WICPngDecoder here, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/wincodec/...