I have a machine that gets used for steam games and kodi and while I also haven't reinstalled it since win10 came out (and even that was an upgrade) windows definitely gets "crufty" even if you aren't installing and uninstalling system level stuff all day. I bet many of the weird performance issues and sudden inescapable long waits that happen on simple tasks would go away if I reinstalled, but to be honest next install probably won't be windows as I think it's about time I get away from the beast of redmond.
Windows just accumulates damage because there's so many competing methods to achieve similar goals, all supported and all used by various services in different amounts and all with surprise penalties once certain limits are breached with seemingly no automatic way to trim the fat when it happens. There are machines at work that do nothing but run firefox on an intranet that I just leave rebooting themselves for default windows update and over the years they just get "weird." Nobody is doing anything to them, windows is doing it to itself, and a reinstall fixes it. I had 3 laptops just infinitely bootloop on the last round of updates because they were in a box for 6 months. Apparently some update issued 6 months ago can't be patched with today's patches in a way that resolves even after 24 hours of "windows is preparing updates". A reinstall fixes it.
Linux tends to "just work" because it replaces your installed system with a set of files from the current, no layering necessary. Problems only occur when you've been editing configurations and then it tends to warn you of that before the next reboot.