"new" outlooks has less features than the old one. And its even harder to find things in settings (they removed a bunch of stuff). I dont look forward to this being on work devices...
Yep, it is straight-up malware. Just like most mail clients on Android and especially iOS. At least there they have the (terrible) excuse of doing it to save power by having their server push new mail notifications through the OS' infrastructure instead of having the app wake the device up all the time.
The fun part is that the new Outlook for Mac is actually better than the new one for Windows (being a nativa app instead of the Electron app for Windows).