Although the conference this was presented at is platform-agnostic, the author is an expert on Linux, and the motivation for the talk is Linux-specific. (Dropbox dropping support for non-ext4 file systems)

The post supports its points with extensive references to prior research - research which hasn't been done in the Microsoft environment. For various reasons (NDAs, etc.) it's likely that no such research will ever be published, either. Basically it's impossible to write a post this detailed about safety issues in Microsoft file systems unless you work there. If you did, it would still take you a year or two of full-time work to do the background stuff, and when you finished, marketing and/or legal wouldn't let you actually tell anyone about it.

Universities can get Windows source code under NDA and do research on it but nobody really cares about such work.

"Getting windows source code under NDA" doesn't necessarily mean "can do research on it".

If you can't publish it, it's not research. If the source code is under NDA, then Microsoft gets the final say about whether you can publish or not, and if the result is embarrassing to Microsoft, I'm guessing it's "or not".

Is that because the windows APIs are better? Or because businesses build their embedded systems/servers with Windows?

I doubt that, was just curious how it might compare in the article.

Certainly depends on which APIs you ultimately use as a developer, right? If it is .NET, they're super simple, and you can get IOCP for "free" and non-blocking async I/O is quite easy to implement.

I can't say the Win32 File API is "pretty", but it's also an abstraction, like the .NET File Class is. And if you touch the NT API, you're naughty.

On Linux and macOS you use the same API, just the backends are different if you want async (epoll [blocking async] on Linux, kqueue on macOS).

The windows APIs are certainly slower. Apart from IOCP I don't think they're that much different? Oh, and mandatory locking on executable images which are loaded, which has .. advantages and disadvantages (it's why Windows keeps demanding restarts)