It's super fast -- it beats a 2026 Macbook Pro rendering Blender "Classroom".
I have a Microsoft account, I don't know what the big deal is. I follow the happy path. It's nice to have settings (and I can control which ones) sync across machines. I pay for a Office365 subscription.
I don't see ads popping up anywhere. I did disable about a dozen things (those silly icons in the search bar, syncing desktop icons across machines, etc) all through exposed UI switches, no "hacks" or undocumented registry tweaks.
I've watched coworkers go through all sorts of contortions, and downloading hacked binaries from sketchy sites, just to avoid creating the local account and I'm not sure why. I use my name and info on my longstanding Microsoft account, but you can just as easily call one "mymaxasus_11111", and be done with it.