I bought an HP in March 2020 when my job went remote and HP bricked it remotely after only 100 pages because I wouldn't sign up for their subscription program. Ended up trashing a perfectly good printer.
Luckily my library's close by and I can print there remotely.
I agree with both of you. Windows is not fine. But it can be made fine with an easy privacy modification.
I recommend ameliorated.io to everybody who needs to use windows. It makes it a viable OS, stripping out the junk, and setting better defaults for security and UI. I run it in VMs whenever I need it.