> It is only required if you enabled write-caching for removable media.

No, it's always required, because applications may be writing to the drive.

I have never done it, and never had any problems. I always assumed it was a feature that only was needed for devices that had some sort of physical requirement for safe shutdown (spinning rust or the like).

By windows. I'm not sure what parted/gparted defaults to.

I think they go with a write cache.

I recall some distros tried to mount USB drives with the sync option back in the early days of USB media.

Problem was that this, in combo with FAT, would basically kill cheap drives lacking wear leveling.

This because every write action was accompanies with a allocation table update. And thus whatever flash cells housed that table would see a massive amount of writes.

Actually i think the mount man file still have a warning about this in the sync option entry.

So this implies that even in windows one needs to safely unmount external media that were originally formatted using parted/gparted?

No, the write caching is a function of whatever's reading the thing, not the format.