The issue is that it's the way Microsoft conduct business at all. The default should be opt-in not hard to find opt-outs for every patch.

I would say no, there is no way to make it more tolerable unless you run something like shutup10 or https://github.com/TemporalAgent7/awesome-windows-privacy but then again if you care that much you should simply just run Linux because in reality there is no real good solution since spyware is baked right into the product.