Wait, really? Coming from Windows and macOS that boggles my mind.

What on earth are the main contributors to that file count? I can't even begin to imagine, but I'm incredibly curious now.

Also, that seems like an enormous waste of disk space. Assuming a 4 KB block size means roughly an average of 2 KB of space is wasted per file, which for 700K files would total about a gigabyte and a half of wasted space. Yikes.

well, it's not like windows is too far off - on my w10 install, c:/windows/ comes up to about 280k files. (and in total, that small-ish system drive, 40 gb, has about 380k files on it. i'd imagine macos has numbers that go something like that as well, since it is a *nix system.

Many filesystems, ext4 included, support inlining of small files directly in filesystem metadata to avoid such waste.