WRT NTFS I don't think they can fix it without releasing another major version of it and that comes with some insane level of risk based on the early churn in NTFS. I don't have an appetite for that. They tried to fork it with ReFS but that went pretty much nowhere.

Powershell is amazingly consistent for sure but each little bit of consistency has numerous inconsistencies in it which aren't exactly stable, hence the whole web request nightmare. Also things like different methods of getting the date return timezone and non timezone aware things. They nearly had it but rushed it out of the door. Also things like WinRM are totally unreliable and don't scale well due to the runtime performance being dire (try arguing with ansible/WinRM failures on a daily basis).

I think a lot of people using object pipelines miss the major point of designing test pipelines which is the first step is to make your pipeline easily parseable. So for example dates as unix dates, colon separated etc. Then you don't need to use regex and stuff. For that little bit of compromise first you end up with something which is several orders of magnitude faster than the UTF-16 and serialisation backed powershell pipelines. Try grepping a few gig of data with it :)

On your last point, you're lucky. This comes up a lot in corporate networks and proxies and occasionally randomly out of the blue.