you very obviously do not know how to administer windows systems

ahem

Active directory, Azure, Windows Server. Those three things are on my resume. I have extensive systems administration experience, being a good systems administrator requires you to be able to administrate more than one operating system.

Yes, windows will ignore your firewalls rules if you try to block certain applications from broadcasting telemetry. I don’t need a citation because you can very easily test this for yourself. The fact that you need a citation tells me you don’t know shit about what you are talking about because it is incredibly easy to reproduce.

You can rip these components out at the expense of usability, to the point where you could potentially have a secure windows system that is so useless, that you might as well just run desktop Linux or BSD. You will never see patches to potential backdoors, you will never see any bugfixes, hell to even begin the process of hardening windows, windows update is the very first thing you have to disable. Even windows AME’s team says that their spin of windows is not as secure as the average Linux distro for these very reasons.