While it's the same problem on phones and you can disable stuff there, it's less of an issue because creation (media, software) happens on a PC and that's a lot more critical. Also, on phones Apple or Google doesn't sneak in an update which re-enables the previously disabled data collection settings. Microsoft went so far to rename NT services to thwart disabling. If Microsoft doesn't fix this soon, they'll either get a lawsuit or lose serious market share.

It's a pity because the kernel and surrounding subsystems are getting better with each Windows release.

Maybe something like nLite can be used to create a Windows image that doesn't contain the nasty stuff, but then an update would reinstall them

The icing on the cake is that even when using Windows Enterprise edition in a Windows Domain, you cannot control what updates are installed as you could before. This is a huge problem because stuff you don't want will be slipped back in.

They just lost their mind.