Is it NTFS or is it the NT I/O stack? Because the latter is so impressively complex I’m not sure if it’s actually possible for it to do fast metadata operations

Is it NTFS or is it the NT I/O stack? Because the latter is so impressively complex I’m not sure if it’s actually possible for it to do fast metadata operations. (I remember Raymond Chen writing there was a special metadata caching layer in the NT FAT driver because otherwise it would be unbearably slow. Linux has a general-purpose dentry cache playing a similar role—does modern Windows have anything similar for NTFS?)