For those interested in a free taste of the plug-in version of VCV Rack.
From the Readme.md in https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal/
It contains over 900 of the free VCV Rack 2 modules.
Compiled binaries for all OSes are here.
On Windows, the installer exe is required. The zip contains plug-in binaries and redundant resource files. I skipped VST3 for now.