What's baffling to me is how this is acceptable to enterprise customers. Your "free PC" was acceptable to you as a poor student, but would never have been acceptable to them. Now, most of this bloatware remains on millions of work PCs.
They know that their home users have likely used and learned about Windows through work. These users see it as the only professional, best in market option.
That seems plausible. Small scale windows installations on there own are not a money maker for them anymore, as evidenced by the scummy adverts to try make up some of the shortfall.
Given that, is it worth the resources to them to make it and test it on many many hardware combinations? They are moving towards Office and VS running on other OSs, SQL Server already runs supported on Linux, VS Code is cross platform, Office is if you count Excel & such having web versions (though they aren't feature complete), so there will be a point when windows in homes and SMEs is not needed as a platform to sell other products and at that point they can let someone else do all that work. They already let Google write their browser, a lot of Devs (including those internal to MS) use Linux tooling via WSL, and they don't care what OS (if any) you run server-side they would just prefer you run the VMs/containers/etc on Azure resources.
I expect they'd still keep making some form of Windows for corporates, but then they can limit the hardware compatibility needs considerably on that area, same for EOM manufacturers who they could foist a lot of that compatibility testing onto.