SMB has its own discovery protocol, that powered the "Network Neighbourhood" since Windows 95 - and it is part of the deprecated SMB1, so modern Samba has a special mode, where the discovery part is enabled, but the rest is disabled. Additionally, Windows can discover SMB shares via WS-Discovery. Samba itself does not support WSD, but there are third-party utilities like wsdd, that will do it instead. Some linux-based NAS-es, like those from Synology, also ship with WSD support enabled out of the box.

My experience with Windows 10 and mDNS/DNS-SD mirrors that from the linked article. As a result, I have now a real DNS domain, with devices with their own A records :/