You don’t have to use NTFS. In fact, it’s not recommended, but the biggest reason you’d want to is if you were dual-booting Windows and wanted to access the same files from both operating systems.

This is good info, thanks! I’ll add it to the fstab entry in a bit.

Edit: I’ve tested it for a bit and made sure the symlinks still work with non-Windows characters. Added it to the guide :)