I've been using emacs on Windows at work for the last few years (at home I use macOS (nee OS X) and linux). What issues have you found, in particular, that were hard to adapt to with emacs on Windows?

I was referring specifically to Spacemacs, vanilla Emacs I don't have any issues aside from missing a few features such as ssh on a clean machine (I had to install plink from putty to use with tramp but spacemacs would have the same issue). Everything else I use mainly for golang or front end and it works really well, I don't crash or hang on anything including autocomplete, eldoc, godoc. I would sometimes freeze in Spacemacs for unknown reasons on start up or even opening a .go or .php file. I didn't feel the need to learn the ecosystem of Spacemacs for the small benefit of layers. I just install EVIL and configured it as I wanted and learned the packages I found useful from Spacemacs and just installed them from Melpa.

I found that on windows Emacs feels sluggish, load times (first open + os files or Ctrl+r+l, scrolling), GUI update on scroll, colors and overall speed of things like shell/auto-complete work 'faster' in mac or Ubuntu/Arch. I don't have any benchmarks to prove it but I do notice a difference between the environments I work on and the machines are relatively close in hardware specs.

as a side note, I did try to use Emacs as a SQL client but it becomes really difficult really quickly, for db development SSMS/VS, or pgAdmin would be better. Unfortunately I was still unsatisfied with those tools until I found Data Grip from JetBrains, it's worth every penny and has an a-okay vim plugin that allows me to work on databases a lot easier. Sadly there are limits to what I can develop inside Emacs productively.