It does not make everybodys lives easier, it makes your life easier by easing the support burden at the cost of making the lives of those who have to live with those policies (marginally?) harder (or more annoying). It is quite a bold claim that those of us who do not shut down our laptops every night have no reason to do so, and you know better than us that it would come with no additional cost to us to do so.

It might very well be that it is preferable to the organization as a whole to sacrifice a bit of productivity everywhere for less burden on IT. But IMHO it should not be a decision which the IT department can make in isolation.

This is the part that people get wrong about all the ITIL metrics nonsense; they’re all designed by people who don’t have a background in science or experimentation and they never account for confounding factors. For instance, companies I’ve worked for in the past actually conducted rigorous studies of improving quality of life (as opposed to “fewer tickets==good”). They discovered that the number one cause of lower ticket volumes is Shadow IT! Because of course it is.

If you are disabling things by policy, it should be after a discourse with your users and a serious attempt at training. Being a GPO dictator is an anti-pattern.

Whatever makes you sleep better at night.

Policies such as yours are tremendously user hostile, and they are a reflection of the company's culture. I would probably not quit such a company, but I would certainly go rouge by either bringing my own equipment, or reinstalling the OS. If reprimanded, then I would quit.

"everybodies life easier"

I don't think this means what you think it means. I'm not a dev, but a mechanical engineer, and having to shutdown nightly, and reopen things the next morning, would cost the company at least an hour of my work time every week.