I just realised writing another response, that a large portion of the reasons I need to run Windows occasionally if to use weird hardware that's windows specific. Things that run odd USB protocols, our even worse require a USB-serial converter with a specific chipset.
For me, it's way easier to keep a "hardware Windows machine" available than to debug why these things don't quite work right in a virtualised environment every time I need to use em.
(really they do one thing and it's this. They practically have a corner on the “aftermarket hotswap drive bay accessory” market, and they have more variations than anyone can imagine :V )
Honestly I would love to try the "hotswap M.2 bay" or "hotswap U.2 bay" things, but it really does drive home how uneven the NVMe future is. Consumers get maybe two NVMes on their motherboard, meanwhile you need 16 pcie lanes to drive a 4-bay hotswap thing. We live in a society where a 1-socket server might have 24 nvme bays attached to it and yet consumers can't even populate an addon bay for their gamer case. (bottom text)
really does drive home the lack of pcie lanes on consumer stuff (given how much pcie continues to be the defacto standard for high-speed expansion) and the death of the "workstation"/"HEDT" segment as being a relatively accessible thing. Nowadays there are client machines and servers, and precious little in-between. You almost might as well just buy an Epyc (ROMED8-2T looks really nice) or just buy a used server as a backend/fileserver/NAS.
For me, it's way easier to keep a "hardware Windows machine" available than to debug why these things don't quite work right in a virtualised environment every time I need to use em.