You can thank Microsoft for that. On the other hand, SMB was not broken, only v1 was disabled by default in Kodi/LibreELEC. You can still enable v1, but no one wants to run a security-problematic network. You can also run Raspbian and properly configure the Samba server, or use NFS server instead. There is also Ubuntu Mate for 16.04 for the Raspberry Pi, also capable of running SMB and NFS servers.
Samba works fine with LibreElec. It was installing Kodi on debian that broke my samba shares.
Oh, and I tried NFS on debian. I got it working, but it always had problems. Samba just plays nicer with Windows and my HTPC will always be windows since I use madvr on it.