Honestly I think both things are true: the consumer apps division of MS is more open and is being allowed to follow the money, even to other OSs. The Windows division is doubling down on all of the worse practices that the law allows them to try to extract some more value from their users.

Thankfully the EU has forced them to curb some of these practices, even if the process is still intentioanlly obtuse. For example, you can't upgrade to an EU version of Windows if you didn't start with one - you have to reinstall Windows from scratch, without preserving any other user settings, and choose an EU country as your locale at this step. Only then do you get to uninstall Edge and no longer need to manually opt-out of all their tracking crap. I'm sure they've still kept a lot of illegal tracking around for now too, though I'm hopeful that in time they'll be forced to remove even that.