Quite simply, they weren't a thing for decades in the Windows world. There were facilities to do so built into the code and NTFS, but you had to be an administr

Quite simply, they weren't a thing for decades in the Windows world. There were facilities to do so built into the code and NTFS, but you had to be an administrator to make symlinks or junctions. The big issue is that backup programs didn't know about them, and would back up things more than once.