I mean you can. Most people who interact with computers aren't that knowledgeable and just want their OS to have usable defaults which is fine.

We're talking about Windows here, where the desktop environment is too thoroughly intertwined with the rest of the OS to ever remove it. The kind of terminal emulator environment that Linux boots into doesn't even exist in versions of Windows that have been sold after the early 2000s.

I was talking more in the lines of taking away most of the windows bloat. If someone wants to install their own desktop environment they will most likely go down the linux path.