I'm in the US and have never ran into half of the stuff people say MS forces on them on a daily basis.

I had it happen once after a windows update. What it has done is put a shortcut on my desktop enough times that I wrote a script to check for and delete them whenever it does.

What is does do way too often is make itself my default PDF viewer. I've got Adobe Acrobat Pro and Bluebeam. I have zero reason to ever want to see a PDF in Edge.

There was a while there where it would default to Edge for PDFs and as a web browser after a update. Quite annoying for a factory full of PCs that I wanted to use Chrome and Adobe Reader instead.

I tried Edge for a bit but stuck with chrome. Recently I've gone back to Firefox but I've not had one of those major updates yet that even tries to get me to log into Microsoft as a log in so it will be interesting when that happens again if Edge shows up as the default.

From time to time when you update windows it'll show you a welcoming setup again similar to the first time you logged in. In that process it will try to convince you to setup some Microsoft stuff on your pc, including changing default apps, but it shouldn't do it on its own.

But sometimes it does. It happened once for me this year.

I'm still on 10, but half the shit I see people complain about with Windows I've never experienced personally. Maybe I'm just lucky? Maybe I just read? I don't know, but I'm not having the same experience as a lot of people on here.