While I mostly agree with what you are saying here, the problem is with these “features” being opt-out vs opt-in. I don’t want ads on my start menu unless I go into my personalization settings and turn them off. I don’t want to have to disable copilot. I don’t want to have to jump through the hoops of turning off one drive. These things should be something I can turn on, not something I have to turn off. I get that it doesn’t take long for someone remotely tech savvy to do, it’s not like it’s a struggle. The problem is that for most people, these services are extremely predatory.

You say it’s much more manageable that people claim, but you’re wrong. I know more normies that own computers than I do tech savvy people. All of these people aren’t good enough with tech to be able to just go find the setting, so they go to the internet to look it up. The top search results are often predatory ad-riddled sites that pitch their weird middleware software as the only solution to the problem. Oops, now the normie has malware. Their computer chugs because their computer is mining bitcoin or something stupid. They go online to look for help. There’s anti malware software available, so they pay for it and install it. It takes up most of their laptop’s crappy specs, making it worse than the malware. They go online for help. One of the top search results is a number for a tech support scammer. They pay them, often an aggregious amount of money, hoping for help. The tech support scammer takes their money, but does nothing (or installs malware of their own, or heaven forbid gets the normie’s banking details). Rinse and repeat this process.

That doesn’t sound manageable at all, and I personally know 4 people who have gone through that entire process, and I can’t imagine that I’m unique in that.

And on top of that, even if you turn off all the settings for all of these windows “features” they are still collecting and selling your personal usage info to the highest bidder, it just is slightly less valuable.