it's going to bombard you with an avalanche of pop ups and nag-dialogues that a person who's logging in every day might not appreciate

I'm not sure what you're talking about because I just don't get any of those.

1. I never installed anything related to 365
2. I opted out of onedrive
3. I turned off copilot

And I never get popups for them. I main Xubuntu but probably spend half my time in Windows 11 for software development and W11 is basically just a visual studio machine for me. I upgraded my CPU recently and it's pretty snappy now, too!

I'm not saying your view is wrong, I'm just saying that your experience has been completely different from mine apparently