Freeing up the disk space in a VM is definitely an hours long struggle the first time, must count research time into it as well. I did it last year. Don’t forget the privacy tweaks and research. Sure you could script most of it, like anywhere.

so you don't trust ms but you trust a script from some guy in his mom's basement in Russia?

Any such tools that are worth their salt have their code posted publicly, you can check it yourself. Most of it isn't some groundbreaking stuff, a lot can be stripped out by just changing registry values and other deeply-ingrained settings that would take a long time to find and edit by hand. I also don't see how "trust into Microsoft" factors in here - it's not about trust, we know there's telemetry that can't be disabled through standard settings, and I know there are features I'd like to uproot entirely (like deep OneDrive integration).

Yeah I can't deal with rug pulls every version. I use xmonad on linux, with no rug for anybody to pull on me.