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I had the occasion to discuss with people involved with Microsoft a few times, mostly on the research front. Great people, with great ideas, and very knowledgeable about their field. Of course they had nothing to do with the lobbying and the windows OS. Microsoft is very large; the corporate drones are only a small part of it. Unfortunately, it’s the part that decides what gets done and pushed out :(
Sure you can. You can also spend time disabling intrusive telemetry, you can also spend time reverting half the UI changes (not the other half though), you can also spend time removing integrated services you don’t use but are still running, you can (regularly) change back some settings that gets reverted every once in a while, you can also block some IP to prevent intrusive ads, you can toggle off part of the “user experience” that bloat the lockscreen…
Or you could, I don’t know, not have to do any of that and still have a working system that’s not trying to bend you over.