It seems a highly counterintuitive thing to say but I have anacdotelly noticed the same when running XP bare metal vs inside a VM running in Linux on the same hardware. Around that era I have hard others notice the same on their PCs as well - and that’s where the origins of this meme comes from. I didn’t spend any time investigating why Windows might perform differently since running the BM was just to save dual booting rather than any performance related reasons however I think it was primarily around file system operations where the difference was noticeable (this was before SSDs were ubiquitous).

Microsoft have invested considerable effort on improving the NT subsystem in subsequent releases of Windows so I would be surprised if that meme was still true. Plus SSDs likely even the playing field too.

Apps certainly have been for a long time.

IE6 was famously (in my parts) known for being perceivably faster under Wine.