Is it safe to rely on registry key Dependencies\Microsoft.VS.VC_RuntimeMinimumVSU_x86,v14 to determine if VC++ 2015 or higher installed?

[Prabodh Mairh]

I am working on an installer which needs to check if VC++ 2015 or higher is installed on the system. I came across this registry key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Dependencies\Microsoft.VS.VC_RuntimeMinimumVSU_x86,v14\Version". It contains the VC++ Redistributable version installed on the system, for example in my case it's value is "14.21.27702" which is the version for VC++ 2015-2019 Redistributable bundle. So far it has worked well for me. I found the behavior consistent on 3 different machines that I tried on, and also with different VC++ Redistributables. The key was missing when VC++ 2015 (or higher) was not installed.

My question is - Is it safe to rely on this registry key or is there any other key that I can rely upon? I browsed a lot for a solution to determine if VC++ 2015 or higher is installed, came across certain threads but nowhere I found any mention of this registry key.
I already went through these related posts:
How to determine whether MSVC++ 2015 redistributable (32- or 64-bit) is already installed?
Detect if Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 is installed

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