The difference now is that you also have to:
1. Uninstall Candy Crush and similar.
2. Disable Cortana.
3. Disable ads and internet search for your Start button.
4. Click through several small greyed out buttons to have a local account instead of cloud account.
5. Do some of these things again whenever an update nukes part of your settings.
As a bonus, they still haven't fixed the decades old thing in file manager where all your directories default to displaying in stupid mode.
In short: pay for the professional version of Windows or prepare to be annoyed.
On trying to download Mojave from Catalina I get "Update not found. The requested version of macOS is not available."
The system seems to try and be clever and uses software updater, and software updater says I can't have that version.
So how do you get Mojave?
Edit: On further testing, maybe this is a regional issue? I'm not in the US and the link is to the US app Store. This makes the App Store app unhappy ("Cannot connect to app store"). Changing the URL to my region doesn't help. Same issue for all downloads that predate my current version (Catalina). El Cap and Big Sur download nicely.
Why does it have to be connected to the Internet? The point of using a USB installer is for it to work offline.
Big Sur makes this incredibly painful though, with its root filesystem stuff. Not sure what I'll do if I ever need to use that version. It may or may not be worth it to modify the snapshot...
This sort of crapware feeds off the folks who aren't aware of the options, or comfortable performing them.
Fortunately it is great for gaming and I have macOS for everything else.
I bought a Razor mouse a year ago (a mistake I won't repeat), and wanted to disable the pointless built-in LEDs. Can't do that without Synapse, and the settings are not retained when you exit the program. So you must keep it running at all times, or you'll be forced to have circus lights on your desk.
I disassembled the mouse and tore out the LEDs. So much for the "just turn it off"-crowd that appears whenever I complain about RGB-infested hardware.
Also, Razer hid the screws under the plastic feet of the mouse, so now they're all wonky since I had to remove them to take the mouse apart.
Don't buy Razer.
Most if not all mouses are designed like that. You can even buy sheets of replacement mouse feet, with varying levels of friction, if you find the current ones too slippery or sticky.