Part of Windows Explorer actually does tons of tiny 4 byte ReadFile calls in to its tracking database like file when you delete a file. If you deleting lots of files this quickly adds up.
This is a great article on why it's so unreasonably slow to modify these archives: https://textslashplain.com/2021/06/02/leaky-abstractions/
But it doesn't seem to explain why it's so much slower at regular extraction.
For example, I run TortoiseGit which has a caching feature which is supposed to make it faster at showing what to commit. Disabling it increases the number of items I can delete per second in my Windows Explorer from about 1000 to about 3000 while making not making TortoiseGit operations meaningfully slower (that I can tell).
This is a Dev Drive [0] on my machine, it would probably be slower on my C: drive which has full Windows Defender real time file scanning.
nah, its equally slow on system with everything ripped out (defender, filters, even logging).
Im saying I have Win10 with everything ripped out, no defender, no logging, no tracelogging, no telemetry, zero filesystem filters/hooks. Delete speed is in the same ballpark as on freshly installed system.
Yes C: is slow due to filters and Dev Drive is faster; but this difference can only be felt when using the command line; Windows Explorer has so much additional overhead that the overhead from file filters is insignificant in comparison.