Not only it's extremely surprising that there's no getting metadata without opening each file―and since DrvFs is only the WSL layer, apparently the system itself still to this day doesn't have such a feature.
But I'm now additionally baffled by how Total Commander managed to feel hella snappy ten years ago while navigating lots of dirs, whereas on MacOS all double-panel managers are meh, not least due to the rather slow navigation.
10 years ago there was less file system integration, user land virus scanning, kernel level virus scanning, os-hooks, OS-compatibility re-direction, and 32/64bit compatibility checks.
This was mostly added during NT6.0 era, which occured ~12 years ago. VISTA was the first OS using NT6.0 and VISTA was VERY much not in vogue ~12 years ago. In fact it was avoided like a plague as of 2008 (unless you were using 64bit, and had >=4GiB of RAM)
So many were using Windows-XP 32bit, or the NT5.2 kernel. Even those with >=4GiB of RAM were on Windows-XP 64bit, as VISTA had a ton of driver problems.
But I'm now additionally baffled by how Total Commander managed to feel hella snappy ten years ago while navigating lots of dirs, whereas on MacOS all double-panel managers are meh, not least due to the rather slow navigation.