I kept closing emacs and expecting the next startup to be super quick and it wasn't. It was clearly starting up from scratch again.

I think the server stuff on Linux / MacOS does start a daemon, but I spent a bunch of time trying to get it to work (quick startup with no visible instances) before I happened to read that one needs to keep the first instance open on Windows.

Separately but related, sometimes emacs doesn't remove the text file that it uses to figure out if there's already a server running or not when it exits. Any further instances assume that another instance is the server and they don't take over as the server themselves. Thus, the zombie text file ensures that the server functionality stops working until you delete the file yourself, manually. I was half thinking about writing an emacs function to check if the pid identified in that text file is legit (i.e., is there a running process with that pid?) and if not then delete the marker file. Somewhere around there is when I decided I didn't want to fiddle _that_ much with my editor :)