On Windows I always used to use Windirstat but it was slow, then I found Wiztree which is many orders of magnitude faster. I understand it works by directly reading the NTFS tables rather than spidering through the directories laboriously. I wonder if this approach would work for ext4 or whatever.
I think you underestimate how much of a speedup we're talking about: it can pull in the entire filesystem in a couple seconds on a multi TB volume with Bs of files. I have yet to see anything in the linux world (including the OP) that comes anywhere near this performance level via tree walking.
I want to take this opportunity to recommend the talk "NTFS isn't that bad"
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbKGw8MQ0i8).
NTFS prefers a different access pattern than most usual file systems.
I remember that a part of the talk was about speed-ups on Linux as well. So even if it doesn't sway your opinion it should enhance your perspective on how file systems work.
