That's a side effect of your device being more secure, yes. After all, the most secure device is a simple rock. Nobody can hack it and it can't rip Marvel movies off Disney+.

To be clear, Microsoft doesn't give a single fuck about you doing piracy, they actually need your device to be secure because otherwise you might switch to another OS for security. Disney and the like, however, will likely in the future require you to use a TPM2 device for advanced DRM.

Of course, if this is something you're rightly worried about, the right course of action isn't to install Windows and disable TPM (which also, as I said, does nothing for disabling Telemetry). It's to install a Linux distro that's hopefully not Ubuntu, because that's way too commercial and not free enough.

Also, at the moment, the Linux desktop install base is small enough that any streaming service can just disable their services for Linux users altogether, TPM or not. So we do actually need to be voting with our OS installs and sooner rather than later.

Your motherboard already has a unique identifier, as does your CPU, your GPU, and I believe your RAM too. It's how their licensing system can tell when your existing Windows install has been transferred to another set of hardware You can overwrite data on your motherboard, but it's like 0.0001% of users who'd do that, so Microsoft doesn't care.

Now, it's possible there are errors in what I'm saying, I'm not an expert. But.

TPM allows Windows to make sure it's still on the exact same machine it was on before, for sure. No trickery. So if you lock your drive with Bitlocker using TPM, it's not possible to just clone your drive and try to unlock in another machine. Any data theft requires the user to have possession of the exact machine you configured it on, in addition to your Windows/Microsoft password. And if someone does something funky with your motherboard firmware, you can't unlock the drive either, because it's no longer the same trusted one. At the same time, a legitimate firmware update from the manufacturer can screw things up too if they're negligent about it. I believe Bitlocker has recovery keys for occasions such as this.

It's also a sort of a secure key storage I believe, so things like Windows Hello facial recognition use it (Apple similarly uses T2 for touch ID on modern macs, but since touch ID came before T2, I'm not sure what they used before).

TL;DR: It has security features, some of them allow for comfort features, some for stuff you don't need too much as a regular joe, but Microsoft is enforcing better security defaults like this because there are ridiculously obscure threats out there and they don't want to be known as "the operating system that gets the most viruses" anymore.

They did. Intel calls it the Secure Element, AMD calls it the Platform Security Processor.