(1) The has been some convergence such as FUSE in Linux which lets you implement file systems in user space, Proton emulates NT very well, and

(2) Win NT’s approach to file systems makes many file system operations very slow which makes npm and other dev systems designed for the Unix system terribly slow in NT. Which is why Microsoft gave up on the otherwise excellent WSL1. If you were writing this kind of thing natively for Windows you would stuff blobs into SQLLite (e.g. a true “user space filesystem”) or ZIP files or some other container instead of stuffing 100,000 files in directories.