Absolutely. Microsoft products are horrendous for this. Every time I have to start up my windows VM to test an IE bug I get assaulted by advertising and "news" in the start menu with bright moving blocks and then I open IE and get hit with it even worse. I don't know why people put up with it tbh.
I kept on wondering why I hadn't seen any of this, and then remembered that I'd installed Classic Shell start menu, which provides a Windows 7 style menu. It doesn't disable the Windows 10 menu, just hides it. Makes for a much more pleasant experience though. (No affiliation)
I followed some 2x reboot windows components uninstall magic some while ago to remove ie and some other "features" i don't remember.. then recently edge was auto installed and made default, Autologin stopped to work, start button got redesign and has an annoying delay. It's a total shitshow by now again until I sacrifice an evening to fix most of this.
I was venting to a friend. He told me he'd deactivated autoupdates some years ago. The foresight, i'm envious. But it's too late now and I think I can never have that.
I also remember some time there was an anti trust proceeding against Microsoft for shipping IE with windows as default. WTF happened to that and how is all this not a 1000x worse.
There was a ruling against MS, but the judge decided to give an interview that showed he may have been biased. MS got a mistrial, and settled the next one.
They don't. [0] Ordinary people install Chrome, and FOSS-aware people install Firefox or one of its variants. Not many use IE/Edge.
I second the parent comment to yours: it's a pity Microsoft vandalise solid technology. Perhaps something could've become of Edge, had they done otherwise.
There's a certain irony in the way we avoid Edge to avoid its insufferable ads, given that they only make ad money if we decide to use it.
