Linux also has virtual file systems.
Re:SQLite: 35% Faster Than the Filesystem
by ectopod on Sunday January 15, 2023 @08:36AM
(#34389278)
The design choices make a bit of a difference but most of the overhead is Defender. When you try to read thousands of files your computer spends most of its time running Defender. Turn it off and the problem goes away.
One core feature is that Windows offers hooks ('filters') that allows other components to put themselves between the client program and the files. This is how virtual filesystems work (like OneDrive, etc.), or how anti-malware works.
When you read from sqlite, then those reads can't come from another server, the objects can't be scanned automatically, etc. Again -- you might not need these features, but it's not that sqlite or ext4 is somehow magically faster; they just made different design choices.