Note that Adobe Acrobat Reader is one of many that does the same thing, it used to do it, stopped for a while, and is now doing it again.
My errant thought is that this sort of thing happens when the marketing departments gain prominence within an organization.
It's not really forced, since it only happens sometimes. Look, I can see you might think something is still done without your consent and without your best interest in mind, but actually you can go an entire night or evening without anything happening! It only happens fairly frequently.
We just need to weaken words a bit until bad things that happen every so often are actually just normal things. Consent is not really necessary anyways, people just get used to being screwed with if you gaslight them slow enough.
Edge isn't so bad anyways. It's basically Chrome, and you already love Chrome. What you really wanted was an Edge icon on your desktop, so it's helpful that the software improved your experience. If you just try to understand instead of fighting it, you'll get used to it.
It's not really forced, it's just anticipated consent. You'll accept these small things eventually, we just haven't made you realize it yet.
Shame on every single <expletive> at Microsoft involved in this decision.