I’ve been debugging and fixing my Macs on my own (well, with internet help of course) for 20 years. They’re still more flexible than windows imo.
Because you can get Windows to never drop thumbs.dbs without much hassle.
You can prevent it from dropping them on network drives (SMB stores): https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208209
I want it to stop dropping these _anywhere_, and I'd be more than happy to give up thumbnail functionality for this. However, afaik the "easiest" way to do this is apparently to bind a hook to listen to all file system writes by everything and then sweep up the junk whenever it is detected...
The ds store has to be one of the silliest design decisions. But say la vee.
Parent's comparison point was linux, but I'd argue current macos isn't that far from current windows.