The same reasons it would on macOS or Windows, most people just aren't writing software which needs to worry about having a single process running many hundreds of threads across 8 sockets efficiently so it's fine to not be NUMA aware. It's not that it won't run at all, a multi-socket system is still a superset of a single socket system, just it will run much more poorly than it could in such scenarios.
The only difference with Windows is a single processor group cannot contain more than 64 cores. This is why 7-Zip needed to add processor group support - even though a 96 core Threadripper represents as a single NUMA node the software has to request assignment to 2x48 processor groups, the same as if it were 2 NUMA nodes with 48 cores each, because of the KAFFINITY limitation.
Examples of common NUMA aware Linux applications are SAP Hana and Oracle RDBMS. On multi-socket systems it can often be helpful to run postgres and such via https://linux.die.net/man/8/numactl too, even if you're not quite the scale you need full NUMA awareness in the DB. You generally also want hypervisors to pass the correct NUMA topologies to guests as well. E.g. if you have a KVM guest with 80 cores assigned on a 2x64 Epyc host setup then you want to set the guest topology to something like 2x40 cores or it'll run like crap because the guest is sees it can schedule one way but reality is another.