Windows had this since at least Win 7, so it's not really a recent advance. I dislike that the the Win 10 start menu is essentially unusable enough that it requires actually doing a search, though, which is why I use a replacement start menu.
Which ironically doesn't work well anymore with Windows 10 because the start menu is often too laggy to open, or because it performs any other kind of unwanted search like web search.
With non-composited window systems (which nowadays is pretty much only Win7 with DWM disabled and pure X11/Xorg) all that overhead goes away since applications draw directly to the video memory that is to be presented to the monitor (the GPU might do some minor composition itself but that is irrelevant as there aren't any delays involved).
Compositing would work if all composition was done on the GPU using dedicated hardware (similar to how the GPU already performs composition for the mouse cursor and an overlay that is often used for HUD-like controls like volume control, but those are not general purpose features that can be used for desktop composition) and applications could draw directly to the video surfaces that would be composited pretty much the same way a non-composited desktop can draw directly to the video memory (this would introduce artifacts like tearing but this is something that could be handled separately and to some - like me - tearing is perfectly acceptable for pretty much all interactive actions).
I am not aware of any GPU or window system that does compositing like this though.