Samba 4.8 from 2018:

* https://www.samba.org/samba/history/samba-4.8.0.html ("vfs_fruit")

* https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Configure_Samba_to_Work_Bet...

That's when Samba gained official easy to use support for being used with Time Machine. I'm pretty sure it was possible long before then, IIRC by changing a setting on the Mac to allow selecting unsupported network volumes.

I don't recall when I stopped running netatalk on my NAS and switched to pure Samba, but I think it was before 2018.