John Siracusa, is that you? ;)

Btw. in what way is NTFS ahead of APFS?

NTFS supports compression, hard links, streams, transactions, quotas, and has a master file table (or multiples of them) which enables tools such as Voidtool's Everything utility to find files in nanoseconds. APFS does not support any of this.

The MFT is very helpful in that it is on the disk itself, as opposed to Apple's solution of getting a separate utility to index the disk (Spotlight) and generating a giant database file on the filesystem in your hidden Spotlight-V100 directory. Spotlight is on the filesystem, not IN the filesystem.

The NTFS page on Wikipedia lists all of the wonderful features of NTFS. Also Windows Internals 6 details some in wonderous detail.

In any case, APFS is far better than HFS+ (which has to flip all metadata's endianness as it is stored in big-endian format). It also has single-threaded access to this metadata, from what I recall. John Siracusa's review 6 years ago of OSX 10.7 Lion detailed the poor state of HFS+: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/

Makes for sad reading.