> You could also boot into an ephemeral minimal initrd

Wouldn't that need a local disk?

It is relatively easy to configure. Just install Linux after windows, and Linux will generally automatically setup a boot-selection screen for you. The installer should detect windows and even shrink the partitions for you.

You can install a prettier looking boot selection menu like rEFInd, but the default works just as well, and I think the mainstream distros all setup secure boot too. On my pc it was very easy, on my (8yr old) laptop I had to add some secure boot keys and the bios was very confusing, using terms that didn’t seem to match what they should have been.

My setup has worked almost entirely flawlessly and survived updates from both OSes. Only issue being “larger” windows feature updates putting windows back as the first OS in the list, but that happens maybe once or twice a year? And it’s a quick bios change to fix the order.

The Debian installer is less than optimal for repartitioning.

The Linux NTFS resizing code also has a tendency to trigger data corruption. Not really Linux' fault, but it's a good reason to do partitioning from inside of Windows, which can be a pain already.

Another issue I've run into is Windows creating a very small (~300MiB) EFI partition that barely fits the Windows bootloader, let alone a Linux bootloader and kernel. You can resize and recreate the partition of course, but reconfiguring Windows to use a different boot partition is a special kind of hell I try to avoid.

SecureBoot is a PITA.

I don't know if I'm understanding your question, but ZFS actively corrects data on disk when it finds a checksum error [0]. Those checksum errors can be found when accessing that data, or doing a 'scrub' action that scans the whole volume to check integrity.

--

  0: https://klarasystems.com/articles/troubleshooting-zfs-common-issues-how-to-fix-them/

ZFS supports self healing, you do not have scrub, it will be corrected during a bad read as long you have a copy. Metadata has 2 copies by default for additional safety for a single disk.