Junctions and symbolic links are very different things on Windows (NTFS also supports hardlinks, distinctly from these other two. You can think of a junction point as a hardlink, but only for a directories, with some other differences dealing with things like network shares. Ordinary hardlinks/symlinks support files as well as directories, however.)

The `mklink` tool in Windows is also by no means new; it's been around for many years. It just wasn't very useful since you needed to be an admin to use symbolic links, anyway.