Another big factor is conceptual simplicity, rather than implementation simplicity. Linux is conceptually simple, you can get a good mental model of what it's doing with fairly little knowledge. There is complexity in the details, but you can learn about that as you go. And because it is "like the unix kernel, just bigger" there have always been a lot of people able and willing to explain it and carry the knowledge forward.
Windows in comparison has none of that. The design is complex from the start, is poorly understood because most knowledge is from the NT 4.0 era (when MS cared about communicating about their cool new kernel), and the community of people who could explain it to you is a lot smaller.
It's impressive what the NT Kernel can do. But most of that is unused because it was either basically abandoned, meant for very specific enterprise use cases, or is poorly understood by developers. And a feature only gives you an advantage if it's actually used