Windows won't let you rename a file that's being used either.

It turns out you can kind of get the same functionality on Windows if you rename the open file and place the new one with the original name, but it's a bit of a hack.

Only if you don't have OneDrive working. In that case, you have to wait for it to sync or it won't go through.

Anytime I have an issue at work where I can't change or delete a file, it's a 50/50 split between Excel and OneDrive being the cause

the mpv player does that too for the cache folder. It's configurable and documented

Yes. On Linux/Unix you don't delete the file, you just delete it's name, which is merely a link to the actual file. That's also the reason why the syscalls name is actually unlink and not delete. As soon as there's nothing pointing to a file anymore, it is deleted.

As long as a process holds a file handle, there's still a reference to said file, so it won't be deleted. That saved me once, when I accidentally deleted a file I wanted to keep: As there still was some process keeping it alive, I could just go to /proc/[process id]/fd/[file descriptor id] and copy it to a safe location.