Q. Is this really as harmful as you think?
A. Go to your parents house, your grandparents house etc and look at their Windows PC, look at the installed software in the past year, and try to use the device. Run some antivirus scans. There’s no way this implementation doesn’t end in tears — there’s a reason there’s a trillion dollar security industry, and that most problems revolve around malware and endpoints.
“By default” meaning it can be changed.
Then someone in the company gets their device compromised, and security starts looking what happened on the device that time. “We’d have that data, but it was deleted yesterday because of the retention policy on recall” -answer from that new guy in IT dept. Security then reminds that the company policy requires minimum 30 days retention for all logging of security events.