Another Windows oddity: each drive letter has its own current directory. D: doesn't mean the root of D:, it means "wherever you last were on D:". Same with C:foo, which is relative to C:'s current directory. DOS baggage that's still around.
For NT-based Windows: only in cmd.exe, and other apps which choose to support the same convention. The NT/Win32 API only supports a single per-process directory
There is actually space in NT data structures to store per-drive current directory, but no released version has ever used it. I think they planned to implement the idea in NT itself (or NT’s implementation of Win32), but then settled on just having a single current directory per-process, and faking the old behaviour in cmd.exe using environment variables
By contrast, Windows 1.x/2.x/3.x/9x/Me retained the old DOS behaviour of per-drive current directories, so Win32 does actually have them if you mean the Win32s or 9x/Me implementations of Win32.
Separately, both Linux and macOS support per-thread current directories separate from the per-process current directory, although by default all threads use the process-wide current directory. Last I checked, the macOS implementation was a bit more sophisticated, in that on Linux once the link between process and thread current directory was severed, it was gone for the lifetime of the thread; by contrast, macOS has an API to re-establish it.
RTL_USER_PROCESS_PARAMETERS has a field “RTL_DRIVE_LETTER_CURDIR CurrentDirectores[32]” (note the misspelling). And then RTL_DRIVE_LETTER_CURDIR is defined as:
typedef struct _RTL_DRIVE_LETTER_CURDIR
{
WORD Flags;
WORD Length;
ULONG TimeStamp;
STRING DosPath;
} RTL_DRIVE_LETTER_CURDIR, *PRTL_DRIVE_LETTER_CURDIR;
https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/km/ntoskrnl/in...
C:\WINDOWS\system32>cd D:\backups\some-huge-directory
C:\WINDOWS\system32>del /s *
Though nowadays system files should be protected even from admin and even if you do manage to delete them, Windows can restore them.