Both. WIndows 8 added a ton of unnecessary operations, part in due to the horrendous new PWA system they made to replace all the proven software.

NTFS meanwhile functionally reflects FAT32. It has no proper block allocation algorithm, so files get fragmented and placed in poor locations all over the physical disk. Tools like defraggler became super popular because they provided serious and visible IO gains from defragging your drives.

Compare that to ext4 which only begins to fragment once you hit something like 95%+ capacity.