Honestly, I'm more interested in reliability and mechanisms to prevent data loss...

Last I checked, the exFAT implementation that MS released to the public was missing some key features that made the Linux port less reliable, particularly for removable storage devices (making it not much better than old school FAT). Has that been fixed already?

Can someone explain to me how and when such a patch would make it into distros? For instance I'm running Debian 12, I'm guessing this won't get added since they just released 13, so this will be put in to version 14 at some point? Or are kernel updates seperate from the distribution development?

That's what I love about linux! Instead of bloat, we get awesome optimizations like this here and there.

Root on exFAT when?