It's not about making me safer, it's about keeping offline OSes as an option. The ability to buy a general purpose computer and do arbitrary things with it is something we take for granted, but will never get back once we lose it.

You didn't buy in, you were shaken down. There's a difference.

Making life so needlessly friction laden so the alternative seems _SO_ frictionless is basically blackmail.

Nope.

is there any guarantee that if i annoy microsoft on github or xbox gaming that microsoft will not disable my windows account tied to those email addresses?

threat surfaces go beyond ephemeral and tracking data.