I thought the “addressed to it” part was implied. you seem to keep saying that windows handles things. The computer is shut down, not in sleep mode. There is no windows to handle things. Windows is not loaded. It has not gone through the boot process. WoL still works if you rip out all the storage. WoL is handled by the network adapter hardware

You’re describing what windows does after a computer is woken/turned on. That’s irrelevant, by that point the WoL is long over. After the pc is turned on and booted then windows is free to do whatever, including putting the system back to sleep. Whether it does this fast enough for you to notice is irrelevant, that is not WoL functionality.

And no, systems are not constantly waking up and then re-sleeping. Again, if the pc was shut down it’d have to go through the whole boot process before windows can put the system back to sleep. And you would find a sleeping pc when you left a shutdown one. Not what happens. And if instead of sleeping it shut itself down that’d look like a boot loop. definitely noticable.

tldr: after the pc is turned on and the os has been loaded, the os is free to do anything

A magic packet is any packet using any protocol with that string in it. And the os cannot respond to a wake-on-lan packet, because the os is not running at the time; the computer is powered off. The os is later informed, via acpi, of the reason it was woken up, should it bother to check. If you don’t want a magic packet, then any packet will wake the system up. I am not aware of any alternatives. Extensions, yes. But not alternatives

yeah wake on lan is pretty hard to accidentally trigger.

Why would random software be sending packets with 0xFFFFFFFFFFFF + mac*16?