It has more to do with Windows services and applications (and even the kernel) only reading file contents on initialization which always happens on a reboot. S

It has more to do with Windows services and applications (and even the kernel) only reading file contents on initialization which always happens on a reboot. Sometimes you can simply log out and log back in, and the requirement to reboot is nowhere nearly as frequent as it used to be, believe it or not, but yes you still have to reboot for kernel patches and core service updates, and there are a lot of those things these days.