It does but good luck getting licensing. They explicitly try to make getting the LTSB/C difficult because they know everyone would buy it if they offered a "clean" version of Windows.

But - if you can swing it - LTSB/C is the only thing that I would prefer for any sort of automation etc.

Probably. But we went from "Here's an operating system available for everyone, consumer and corporate alike!" to "This one's for consumer, this one's for corporate" and MS and their distributors would be fools not to capitalize on that.

In other words, as a business, you now have less choice in distributors, which will increase the investment cost for an operating system. And then there's the whole privacy issue on top of that, too.

It's just a mess, and the customers are intended to take the brunt of it. I want to say "No, thank you" and I'm currently figuring out if that's viable, i.e. Linux.