IMO it’s because Windows is targeted for general use so they don’t bother optimizing anything. They’ll just convince people that thei have aging hardware when things become slow and say stuffs like “unused RAM is wasted RAM” to justify taking up half of my memory on idle.
Even running Linux from a USB is still a way smoother experience than running Windows for me.
These recommendations are good. I personally wrote my own Python script to use the Spotify API to get playlists and metadata then download the audio off YouTube.
It’s similar to spotdl but the last time I used them, they were only taking the first audio (which could be the music video version). So for my script, I put a filter for duration, prioritize YouTube music, and use keywords like “lyrics” and “official audio” that’s more likely to match the Spotify version