You are right. Anyway I am not sure that audio on my ThinkPad E550 has been working 100% well for all these years. There have been little surprises for every Windows 10 update.
Eg. audio cut when I loaded Skype or when I swapped between different windows sometimes.
I suspect that the Conexant driver has been patched several times to get it working on different W10 versions. Now, for some reason, they have to make it from scratch. It could be because of the "Core" changes they are making to separate the Windows 10 Core System from different UIs.
Kind regards,
Miguel