Windows 8.1 Forgot How To Delete Folders?

I have a backup USB drive (1 TB MyBook) formatted by me to NTFS and with a big set of files on it. I'm going to use the drive for something else, so I chose to delete the one and only root folder:
\Backup
In File Explorer, I held the shift key down, right-clicked the Backup folder, and chose Delete.
Lo and behold now Windows 8.1 claims it's going to take a significant amount of time to do it...
What?!? This is ridiculous.
When did it start taking any time at all to delete a folder and all the files underneath it? Note that I held the shift key down - this is not a recycling operation. I also don't have anything special set up to overwrite deleted file data.
Sure, there are a whole lot of files on the disk, but every version of Windows before now would have just blown off the folder and been done in an eyeblink.
What's going on with file system handling in Windows 8.1?
Did Microsoft forget how to make their own file system work efficiently?
-Noel
Detailed how-to in my eBooks:
Configure The Windows 7 "To Work" Options
Configure The Windows 8 "To Work" Options

Thanks, Roger, but with near 40 years experience in computers I kind of already kind of know how file systems work.
The thing is, with older NTFS implementations it was possible to delete whole subtrees of large numbers of files
without waiting very long. It worked quickly in part because the pertinent NTFS data structures were cached in RAM.
The only thing I can think of is that the new NTFS online self-healing mechanisms may have changed the sequences of operations to make them safer. Also since this was an external disk
the cache may not have been enabled at all (I didn't look). It's not connected to the computer at the moment, but I'll plug the drive back in at some point and check, then report back here.
Perhaps I'll try reformatting the drive with ReFS and see how that works by comparison.
-Noel
Detailed how-to in my eBooks:
Configure The Windows 7 "To Work" Options
Configure The Windows 8 "To Work" Options

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