That is muy point, a lot of people that swap from windows probably have several drives for the HDD or just extensions, being able to access that stuff is key for a smooth transition.
Also, im going to ignore you calling basic Linux commands to enable services, swap DEs, install and uninstall stuff, add drives by wirtting them in fstab as it has been done since the dawn of time... hacks, but as a side note, if the OS limiting you from fucking up your system is what gave you a stable experience... Maybe don't fuck it up? BRTFS has snapshots, you can configure the system to snapshot every time you install stuff... Idk.
Then it's your anecdotal experience vs mine, I've been using a better main drove connected to two NTFS drives, one for torrents and videos and downloads and another for games. 2 years almost like this and all games run perfectly fine. Souls games, path of exile (quite read heavy), league, hots, last epoch monstwe hunter... You name it, it has worked perfectly fine for over a year.
Maybe it has improved since that happened to you idk, and I agree that threshold not allow NTFS for the main drive of, but for external ones it's just silly.