I never though of the red dot around on my service menu (get iCloud) to be an add. Now, I’m pissed because it is exactly that. I still have a Gb free, why is it notifying me that I need more space. I will never use that space.
Yet I see comments regularly criticising Microsoft's embedded one drive ads(not by you in particular, in general and not that I support that either).
That's the insidiousness of Apple's marketing, they've sold their products as a brand, ecosystem and lifestyle so well, nobody notices every time they use an Apple device, they're essentially not only being constantly marketed to, but are walking advertisements themselves.
Being locked down in a curated, walled off ecosystem controlled by the purveyor of your device is the epitome of being trapped in a bubble of constant marketing for their products.
How far we've come from the days when everybody lost their shit because an os vendor bundled a web browser with their os.
MS / Windows 10: Uninstall the preloaded OneDrive app in the standard way
Apple / macOS Catalina: Reboot to recovery, mount the system drive (avoiding SIP etc), use Terminal to move a plist from the System LaunchAgents - named "followupd", in case you thought it wouldn't be hidden / obfuscated. Unmount and reboot, praying you didn't break your OS. Then delete a few preference files for System Preferences.app. Oh, and likely have to repeat the process after updates
Which one would you be comfortable helping a less technical person do? And given the trajectory of macOS, I wouldn't be surprised if they close that "loophole" soon...
I know the wording used to be something along the lines of "every iPhone comes with 5gig of icloud storage". The new wording is "iCloud is built into every Apple device ... Everyone gets 5GB of free iCloud storage to start"