I'm 99% certain you could boot BSD from DOS back then too. 386BSD 1.0 contains a "boot.exe" which works with FreeDOS -as long as you don't load anything else!
I think that FreeBSD 2.0 may have used the boot utility as well -but I'm not sure.
I remember when I encountered Linux in the late 90's there was a distro that sat on MS-DOS; I think it may have been "Monkey Linux" ( https://projectdevolve.tripod.com/table/descript.htm )? It wasn't Slackware -but I pretty quickly found slackware and began using "zipslack" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZipSlack) before diving in and doing a real Linux install.
So by 97 or so Linux was figuring out more sophisticated ways to co-exist with DOS if not Windows95. Probably had been for a couple years before that -but 97 is when I found Linux so I don't know.
And yes, by the time XP was released Linux was popular enough that people didn't bother making kludges like that any more. It probably didn't help that vfat and fat32 were different than the old umsdos file system so that the drawbacks out-weighed the benefits.
https://github.com/386bsd/386bsd/tree/1.0
I think that FreeBSD 2.0 may have used the boot utility as well -but I'm not sure.
I remember when I encountered Linux in the late 90's there was a distro that sat on MS-DOS; I think it may have been "Monkey Linux" ( https://projectdevolve.tripod.com/table/descript.htm )? It wasn't Slackware -but I pretty quickly found slackware and began using "zipslack" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZipSlack) before diving in and doing a real Linux install.
So by 97 or so Linux was figuring out more sophisticated ways to co-exist with DOS if not Windows95. Probably had been for a couple years before that -but 97 is when I found Linux so I don't know.
And yes, by the time XP was released Linux was popular enough that people didn't bother making kludges like that any more. It probably didn't help that vfat and fat32 were different than the old umsdos file system so that the drawbacks out-weighed the benefits.