Windows has been “faking” performance from a long time.
Most of what windows claims in better performance over Linux and other more obscure OSs (iOS to me is trash, but it fakes performance the same way windows does) relies on the fact that windows never really performs full self tests or integrity checks. One of the most problematic features, often subject of dozens of how-tos on the internet and doubled down by windows every revision, is the crappy sleep routine.
Linux and other systems rely on files that arent modified if not manually. Most of the dynamic stuff in Linux will be made by systems of buffering and swapping, so it can safely “stop everything” and “resume” without restart. It also allows linux to simply “clean up and restart” from the directives it has “manually set”, without requiring a registry of what it is doing or have done to know where to be.
Windows use a form of self “regulation” which presumes windows knows better than anyone how to set up itself, and for that it keeps that registry and other tools that serves the purpose of controlling windows “setting up itself”. What that causes in most cases is that sleeping always gives problems. Not really minding that, MS then decided to use a new feature from windows 8 I think, in which the system never really restarts, it simply keeps a huge clunky image that cannot be really “restarted”, so most of the time, you dont restart your computer even if you turn it off and on again.
While nothing new, as it happens since windows 95, the system then have something we relate to “aging”. Windows to keep it working, needs to keep engorging the registry and other system “metadata” to sustain the inner workings of the SO. As a result, it keeps growing in redundant and often contradictory data that needs to be processes sometimes for no reason. As it grows, windows naturally loses performance, and to counter that, instead of solving the problem itself, MS instead started to ignore tests that should be done, but require too much process if done with the whole “body” of the SO, so it simply does not.
Not even if you use the “CTRL POWER OFF” that should work like the old shut down, it does not anymore.
To people like that does not matter, because I use windows inside a Virtual Machine, so I can use it as a “fresh install” all the time, and if I install something new, I can “refresh the image”, install what I want, “bake the image” and each fresh install will have the softwares I use. Very little needs to be kept from session to session.
But if Windows is your main SO, it will only get worse as MS doubles down in this flawed method.