1) Have you tried installing Linux? ;-)

2) I have run macOS VMs without iCloud. I'm not sure of the nags though. I believe signing out of iCloud will prevent iCloud from contacting Apple.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/104958

1) yes:)

2) that is entirely NOT true. You should install little snitch and see what happens even if you NEVER sign into icloud. note that the phone home contact is not immediate, it happens in the background at random intervals from random applications.

just some random services blocked by little snitch on a mac:

accountsd, adprivacyd, airportd, AMPLibraryAgent, appstoreagent, apsd, AssetCacheLocatorService.xpc, cloudd, com.apple.geod.xpc, com.apple.Safari.SafeBrowsing.Service, commerce, configd, familycircled, mapspushd, nsurlsessiond, ocspd, rapportd, remindd, Safari, sntp, softwareupdated, Spotlight, sutdentd, syspolicyd, touristd, transparencyd, trustd, X11.bin

(never signed into an apple id)

Tell me more about how dastardly it is that Safari communicates with Apple servers. Type it from your browser that doesn’t communicate directly with its developers.

Judging from a lot of these comments, most of the folks here are reading/commenting via telnet.

I’ve never used iCloud since it came out. I can’t think of a single nag. Where do you see it on your iPhone or Mac?

I have an iPad (not iPhone or Mac). If you don't set up Icloud, there's always an annoying bright red circle in settings that tells you to "finish setting up your iPad".

Doesn't have to be bright red, or even there at all.

Last time I had that on a laptop I was going to wipe soon afterward and didn’t want to fully set up, I clicked the “finish setting up” link and canceled out. Voila, red circle gone.

Gone until a few days or a week later, when it comes back.

Yes, that’s the only one I’ve seen. But it’s not much of a nag.

There's several of them. The most annoying for me was getting intermittent notifications to sign in to iCloud.

There's also this one: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250727947

I eventually just gave in to stop the nags.