Someone released a windows xp pirated edition on a blog one time. Bloat removed, PAE, many fixes and new features. The post also had many comments. One described something not working. The dev replied: Thats terrible! Wait! then replied again 15 minutes later: Download the new release, it should be fixed now. There were more comments following the same format.

Imagine that, they fixed the bugs... they fixed the bugs immediately.

I haven't seen a single ad in Windows 11 since I turned off whatever settings those were that I don't even remember because it was over 2 years ago. I was initially worried by the FUD that spreads about how these settings will get undone with various updates, but it's never happened. This doesn't sound like aggressive advertising to me. It took me longer to find an article explaining how to get rid of the ads in the Ubuntu motd.

The worst thing that's happened to me with a Windows update was that I lost the ability to use the old style alt-tab behavior in 24H2, but that led me to "Alt-Tab Terminator" which works fine.