That’s apple. Android has traditionally allowed sideloading. They aren’t be forced to open up anything, they’re just adding restrictions.

You are correct. Fast startup used to be called fast boot, hence my confusion. And it looks like the current state of windows is saved in nonvolatile for fast startup, which I would consider not being fully shutdown, but that’s probably semantics at that point.

I had this issue and it was a fast boot issue. I’d shut down windows and boot Linux and WiFi wouldn’t work. A restart would fix it. With fast boot, windows doesn’t actually shut down, it’s more like a hibernate state. So the driver or whatever it’s called was being held by the widows partition and wouldn’t respond to another kernal.