Good for you. Most people don't want Microsoft to own their data. You get that? User's data belong to them, if you are set to share all your personal data with Microsoft , then it should be an opt-in process (maybe they can entice you with Bing points or some sort of rewards?). It should be offline by default. As customer are already paying for the operating system. You can also use many syncing solutions from Google drive to dropbox, and many others. Regarding the "amount of time I spend worrying about hard drive failure" , never have I had a hard drive that just dies, is possible , but extremely unlikely, I make a backup of my important stuffs to other hard drives or the cloud. Cloud sign-on is just another way to track users and violates their basic privacy rights.

I’ve had more critical OneDrive failures in the last two years than hard disk failures in the last 30 years. I’ve experienced actual data loss on OneDrive three times since 2020.

It’s not a backup and it’s a shitty safety net for trivial cases. Fortunately I had beem backing up OneDrive up using Beyond Compare to an external disk and doing a binary comparison so I could find the cocked up files and recover them.

It’s funny the only time I’ve had to do a restore is because Microsoft’s cloud fucked up.

Well, I'm glad you trust your employer to be a good steward of your personal data. I certainly don't trust them...

Even aside from the "MS owning your data" point other people are surely taking issue with - people are syncing their personal and work devices?

I do not want that at all!

I think you missed the "mandatory".

It's like religion. You have one. Good for you. Don't shove it down other people's throats.

Edit: I just realized this could read rather harsh. I didn't refer to you explaining your preferences, but "shoving it down our throats" is seemingly the current attitude of MS as a whole.

I use it too, but seriously why is it so obfuscated to create a local account? Microsoft is clearly making it very hard.