It's a setting called "Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen", and it's checked by default.
Death by a thousand cuts. So many micro abuses by the OS that keeps reminding you who has the power.
I don't see any of the other things you do. I use Edge as my default browser, with uBlock installed and it all seems to work. There is a Copilot icon, but I think I could remove it if it irritated me, which it doesn't. My Asus Zenbook has a Copilot key which irritates me much less than other aspects of the keyboard layout which have nothing to do with Microsoft.
All in all, I like Windows 11. I don't see how it has made things worse than any of the other NT versions.
you interest me strangely - which one?
I pay for a 365/OneDrive subscription and it works well. I get the apps on desktop/laptop/phone and 1 TB storage for a decent yearly rate. I log into the PC and laptop on the same account and useful things sync.
I've done mild tweaking to turn a few things off, like the icons in the "search" bar, but nothing's been "hacked". On Macs you're pretty much have to make an Apple account too, but somehow that's not evil?
Really? Isn't this only for App Store and other Apple services? You can still do your everyday basic things, including downloading and installing software from internet.