

There used to be a bug in ms word (idk if it’s still there, it’s been years since I last used any ms office app) where, if you had a separate printing server connected to a printer, and the printer was off but the server was online, it would try to fetch printer features, resulting in an unanswered request that would end up timing out. For some reason, word would completely freeze until the request timed out at 30s. No input worked, screen didn’t refresh, window controls didn’t work either. Completely frozen. And the worst part was that word would try to fetch printer features every time you clicked completely unrelated buttons. Want to export to PDF? Frozen for 30s. Want to save your document with a different name? First wait for 30s. Oh, you want to change the page size? You guessed it, 30s frozen.
No. Hardlinks and CoW filesystems are different things.
I don’t know much about hardlinks on windows, but hardlinks usually are two different inodes pointing to the same file. This means, for the user, a single file appears duplicated, but without using any extra space. However, both files are really the same one, so if you modify one, the other one also gets modified.
CoW filesystems, on the other hand, are a bit more complex. When you store a file, its contents get first stored, and then a file references them. When you copy the file, a copy of the reference is made, and there is no need to copy the content, because it’s already there. If you modify one of the copies, the difference between them gets stored (the modified content), but other parts of the file (or files in a folder) that don’t get modified are not duplicated.