Most likely easy to disable. Pretty sure I have Cortana and Microsoft Store but I disabled the services, removed the Taskbar icons and never think about it heh.

I wouldn't be surprised if both of those are still running in Task Manager's process list if you look, under unassuming names like SearchUI.exe. It's quite hard to disable Microsoft's malware in my experience, a lot of it relaunches itself, or comes back after an OS update. The number of running Microsoft processes goes up every year.

I've given up. If you have a computer with a spinning rust disk this crap alone will saturate the I/O and become completely unusable. (then you have OEM bloatware which has also become harder to remove and bloated software in general on top of that.)

At this point I just hand people thumbdrives with PopOS on them when they complain that their computer is slow. Both OSes run Android apps and between that, the web, and wine most people hardly miss anything.

I doubt it. What's important too is that you have to use a MS account to use teams, goodbye local windows accounts.