IO on many little files is dramatically faster in Linux on ext4 vs Windows thanks to NTFS' journaling overhead. So if you're doing development, you really want to do it inside wsl2.
I think it's more complicated just than NTFS's design.
In my original comment I said that the difference is the Linux VFS for a reason. The slow part in NT is when you go from a filename to a handle. Doing things like caching lookups by name is, IIRC, the responsibility of the individual drivers. Linux does better at this by having a heavily optimized layer sitting between the filesystem driver and the caller. Doing tons of open(2)s is faster on Linux because of the overall kernel design.
