> Windows' filesystem filter drivers add a lot of overhead to every operation, and Windows Defender and its realtime scanning in particular makes it 10x worse. (NTFS itself is fine.)

Are there a lot of Microsoft operating systems that feature NTFS without filesystem drivers and Windows Defender?

It's the filesystem filter drivers that slow things down, not the filesystem drivers (ie NTFS) themselves.

Filter drivers sit a layer above the filesystem driver and allow you to hook file operations to do things like antivirus scanning, transparent encryption and compression, realtime backups, and implement virtual files (à la Dropbox and OneDrive cloud files that are deleted from local storage and JIT downloaded when accessed).

Those are all useful features, but you pay for the extensibility with performance.

To answer your question, obviously no—at least not in a default configuration—but all that stuff can be disabled if you're so inclined, which would leave you with a Microsoft operating system featuring NTFS without the filters and Defender.

But I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Different operating systems make different trade-offs?