Not a replicant

Ah yes, that’s a concern - but I have a job in Task Scheduler that re-writes my registry tweaks - mostly changing various tasks back to “disabled”. You can trigger it hourly, or on an event. As soon as a selected event - such as a telemetry switch-on - hits the event log, the “disable” script runs.

There’s other ways, like taking ownership of the executables and changing permissions to lock out the “SYSTEM” account.

And pihole blocks DNS resolution of the telemetry harvesters as well. Windows update won’t touch that. It’s not 100% effective, but I couldn’t be bothered to take it further.

That’s why you build a ringworld instead.

Or the slightly more achievable version - Ringworld.

It’s not difficult to block the mining and telemetry. Pihole, a few registry tweaks, a few scheduled tasks disabled and life goes on.

Folk see nothing wrong with spending hours tuning a Linux distro, but they object to doing the same with Windows?

FWIW I use vanilla Debian for everything other than what I’m required to use Windows for.