Comment by hpfr

Honestly, I think people's reliance on X forwarding is just due to the fact that it happens to exist, not because they really need it. There's nothing like X forwarding on Windows to my knowledge. If X forwarding didn't exist people would have figured out how to do what they needed over SSH with text or when GUI's are irreplaceable sysadmins would have set up an actual remote desktop solution like on other modern operating systems.