I don't believe that Windows 95 have protected memory or preemptive multitasking. That came in with the NT versions of Windows. I switched to Windows in 97 when NT 4 came out. The Mac OS was definitely lagging behind NT around that time period.
“Microsoft made preemptive multitasking a core feature of their flagship operating system in the early 1990s when developing Windows NT 3.1 and then Windows 95. It was later adopted on the Apple Macintosh by Mac OS 9.x” [1]
You’re right about Win95 (and Win98 and ME) not having true memory protection, but when comparing MacOS and Windows back then MacOS’ lack of memory protection was always mentioned.
