NTFS isn’t the issue, at least in my experience, and not even Microsoft’s implementation of it (though ntfs-3g seems faster). The issue is the File Explorer: Things like reading mtimes of gigantic directories takes maybe a second under linux, nushell under windows (native, not WSL) is just a tiny bit slower, while File Explorer takes minutes to sort by mtime. Coming to think of it I should try Dolphin.

Generally speaking the problem with Windows is not so much NT but everything on top of it.