I don't think that the god-awfulness of Windows Update is in any way related to the hardware you're running when anything else on the market designed for the same purpose outperforms it.
Updates take ages to download and even longer to install. There is no verbosity option, only a progress bar that likes to get stuck. Did an error occur? Here's an unhelpful 0x%RANDOM% code, where the only mention of it online comes from those who also suffer from it.
How come apt, dnf, pacman or other open source utilities, that are often maintained by an individual, just work, when something with a development team sucks at it so much? While there are an under-the-hood differences between Windows and Linux, replacing system components and libraries should be the same everywhere.