The filesystem (NTFS) being god awful slow with large numbers of files is a good reason.

It boggles my mind that Microsoft has not gotten around to making this better. Apple even introduced introduced a new FS (APFS) and migrated people silently and successfully.

WSL is a nice to have gnu inside of windows, but one of the reasons I switched to linux was because I enjoyed setting up a window manager and configuring my status bar, writing custom scripts for keybindings, general fiddling. There are distros that compete with windows in the UI space, and maybe those don't make much sense anymore.

I'm sort of answering my own question here too - people that don't love tinkering for its own sake may not ever be driven away from windows.

Bare metal Linux is much faster than Linux on windows in my experience.

Also does nothing to address all the other windows rot like ads in the start menu and excessive telemetry.

Trust. Windows is a forein OS with backdoors.