Oh this is wild to me too. I work IT support and we recently started swapping everyone to W11, and as soon as I upgraded mine I turned off all their ads, news/weather popups, Bing search garbage. When I ask people if they want help to get rid of it they're like "nah I'll just live with it" as if it wasn't the most distracting thing in the gd world.
I don't find it surprising at all. The menus are often designed as kafka-esque with dark patterns all over, hiding toggles in submenu after submenu to make you go for the default setting (see privacy settings on facebook, notification settings on android). Then the app updates, the setting is somehow reverted, and you're back to square one. No wonder people give up.
And even if you change the setting, they constantly re-enable it ("They didn't like it before, but they'll love it now that we added AI!!1") and then move the setting somewhere else