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.