What is shocking is the content is so low quality it's appalling it came from a big, respected company as Microsoft. A lot of the posts are often clickbaits, and there are ads carelessly interspersed between the posts all over the page.

I know it makes a lot of money for Microsoft but the fact they chose to keep the quality so low really looks bad.

"Respected"? Since when is Microsoft respected?

The company is respected for being so big and being a stable, high performer. Obviously they did a lot in "personal computing" as well

Biz, gov and mil management relies on MSFT; executives, their attorneys and bankers, respect MSFT for doing what they do ($$). Similar to big retail and worse, gambling, the single user is last in line; used and abused individuals.. nobody expects a lot from the individuals involved, and their opinion matters less. Wolves among sheep, basically.

blocking msn.com via hosts will give you a blank new tab page in Edge, only including an Edge background image, and a search bar leading to your chosen search engine.

You can disable all that from Edge itself, at least on the desktop. When on the new tab page, there's a "Page settings" icon in the top right. If you click on that, there's a bunch of options there regarding what should be present on the page; the bottom-most item is "Content", and if you set it to "Content off", it all goes away.

true, but the default new tab page sets cookies and connects to MS all the time. When blocking msn.com, it loads local resources only.