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I've never owned an Apple anything and yet I swear I still find .DS_Store files on my Windows/Linux machines from time to time.

Assuming you deal with software, I'd guess that's because someone has committed them to a repo. It's one of the reasons Mac-based devs should always have a global .gitignore file.

Maybe a shared directory someone has browsed from their macOS box?

I see them on my CentOS servers.

But then I also see tons of Thumbs.db

I miss Asepsis. It was a daemon/dynamic library that would redirect the .DS_Store file location. Unfortunately, it can't run on modern Macs due to System Integrity Protection.

Dark mode is darker than what I had expected. Only the focussed window looks good. Background windows are black.

Question for anyone who knows: is there a reason .DS_Store files cannot instead be stored as xattrs on the directory inode they’re “for”?

In the old days, that's exactly what Apple did with HFS. The issue there is that other filesystems, and notably remote filesystems such as one might access with FTP or NFS or whatnot, did not support that. For portability across filesystems, Apple started using .DS_Store files.