There was a nice period with devices like the Surface or "Signature Edition" hardware sold through Microsoft where you could get a minimally fucked up Windows install from the factory.

But it turned out that was just the intermediate step between "quit gunking up our OS with so much awful garbage and spyware" and "because it should be gunked up with our awful garbage and spyware."

I think any given day here you can find at least one article getting attention that, no, it has not always been like that and has been getting worse. The most obvious being the Recall debacle. That is in my memory the first time outrage got big enough that Microsoft had to walk back an entire feature they were trying to opt everyone into by default.