The only one I ever found was that it made new installations of Windows free with a digital licence associated with your account. I don't know if this is still true of Windows 11.

I ended up making an MS account to store the license info but I just use it once per install to log in/activate then create a "real" local account. Hopefully this still works.

It forced me this last time I set up windows 11

There are several bypasses.

Don't connect to the internet -> Shift + F10 to bring up CLI -> OOBE\bypassnro

The out-of-box experience will restart, and you will have a button to set up with a local account.

You can also (or at least could, it's been a bit since I've tried this method) use a banned e-mail account when it asks for your Microsoft account.

Additionally burning the ISO to Thumb drive with Rufus [1] gives an option to disable Microsoft Accounts and hardware validation upon installation.

[1] - https://rufus.ie/en/

OOBE\bypassnro still works. I've been setting up a bunch of new machines recently (last was yesterday) that I've had to connect to a local domain, so this made it so much easier to just make a local account then domain join the machine.

Hit Shift + F10 at the Windows 11 setup screen to open a command prompt, then enter `oobe\bypassnro`. After this, skip connecting to a network and this will allow you to create a local account.

It's extremely obnoxious that they've made it this difficult.

didn't work for me on 24H2 /shrug

it worked for me on win11pro 24h2 just a few days ago; maybe you had a lan cable connected?

This conversation is surreal.

for you it was probably because it's pro... others have stated pro and above still let you go without an MS account.