That comment was Win 10 (possibly 8/8.1 too) specific, I edited my post above, apologies for the confusion. With 7 I did the same as you. Some people suggest moving the hiberfil.sys out of the SSD of which I disagree.
By default W10 have fast-startup enabled: during shutdown the user session is closed but thereafter the system core is only suspended to disk. This is without the hibernate function enabled at all.
Hence the shutdown times are somewhat longer. In return the power up is much speedier as the OS simply re-activates and only the user environment is initialized. The restart function is the one that does full shutdown (fast) and new system load (slower).
Fast Startup - Turn On or Off in Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums
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RE: Win7 size Windows folder 36 GB
That does sounds excessive. But unless disk space is critical, "if it ain't broke" works the best!
Dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore
(run as admin in CMD) would show how much is really taken.
What normally grows much is Program Data folder on "C" and the App Data folder under user profile. This disk space analysing tool is to cool to miss:
SpaceSniffer
I was never successful with actual use of system restore points, so prefer to delete all but the last one
How to delete old restore points to save disk space? - Microsoft Community