[TheGoddessInari]

> IIRC they don’t have to exist on modern Windows on NTFS (there’s a switch somewhere that turns them off), but they’re still on by default for compatibility reasons (Windows 10 can still run DOS and 16-bit Windows programs, after all).

You can disable it, but realistically it won't make a performance or efficiency difference (only reason go mess with it really), and lots of things still break if 8.3 compatibility is disabled or stripped. On occasion, this had included weird first-party errors, too.

In theory, there are tons of things that shouldn't matter any more either, like spaces in filenames, or variables like PATH being longer than 2047 characters, but it all still ends up somehow breaking various things over time.