Ultimately, the only reason we need to look at is late stage capitalism (and I say this as someone who believes in the market economy). Windows was the historic money maker at Microsoft, they held all the keys, all the power. The regime is changing however. OSes are more and more commoditised and the money has moved to Cloud and now AI. But there is one rule of the market: you have to post gains every quarter. So what is the Windows team to do? There is no growth to be had anywhere else, so they become increasingly less scrupulous in an effort to squeeze more $$$ out of the product.

This is obviously a race to the bottom. They know, we know it, the market knows it. However, as long as the numbers keep going up, the market will reward this self destructive behaviour and the team will indulge it.

They aren't stupid, they know that these features are annoying, but they'll keep pushing them to find the optimal point between the users being pissed off and profit going up.

The risk is of course that they launch a positive feedback loop of exodus and end up destroying the product in the long term, but in the long term we are all dead and the PMs profiting from these user hostile policies will be long retired...