Linux just has more filesystems, and sadly a lot of them have various flaws. I'm surprised when people are surprised that Linux isn't some completely superior technical marvel. BSD and Unix systems have been more advanced for decades..

Everyone on Linux still uses tar for god's sake, even though zip can use the same compression algorithms people use on tarballs, and zip actually stores an index of its files rather than 'cat'ing each record on top of the next like an append-only tape archive. (Obviously there are better formats than 'zip' for any platform, but it's just strange that nobody has moved away from tar)

tar is good enough for many uses, so people did not move on.

And it doesn't help that tar.gz / tar.bz2 compresses way better than zip in most cases (thanks to using a single compression context, rather than a new one for each file; and also compressing the filenames in the same context), and that it carries ownership and permission information with it - whereas zip doesn't.

The HVSC project, who try to collect every single piece of music ever created on a Commodore C64, distribute their archive as a zip-within-a-zip. The common music file is 1k-4k, goes down to ~500-1000 bytes zipped; The subdirectory+filename are often 100 bytes with a lot of redundancy that zip doesn't use, so they re-zip. Had they used .tar.gz or .tar.bz2, the second stage would not be needed.

Is that really a feature the file system provides? Or does that command simply walk the MFT and finds all hardlinks to the same file record?

As far as I know NTFS does not store what hard links point to a file.

I don't know. I do know there are tens of thousands of hardlinked files under system32, and the command I listed above can enumerate links pretty quickly.