However, at that time I had no idea about the existence of the "S mode". I could not install on the laptop some applications that were distributed and used internally in the company and which were essential for my work.
I requested assistance from the IT department, but at that time not even they had any idea about the existence of the "S mode", so they were equally baffled why on my previous Dell laptop I could easily install any application, while on its new replacement I could not. For a couple of weeks, various IT support people from teams located on several continents had repeatedly connected remotely to my laptop every day, trying to solve the problem, but without any success.
Even the OEMs that do offer the option to have Linux pre-installed keep pushing for "Works best with Windows".
What is a non technical user to do, the choice ends up being macOS, Windows, or ChromeOS thin clients.
As I have mentioned, in another comment, some years ago I had the same problem when replacing an old corporate laptop with a new one, but at that time nobody from the IT support knew about the existence of the "Windows S mode".
At that time, seeing that none of many IT support people could do anything, I assumed that there was some kind of miscommunication inside the IT department, and there was some administrator who had configured some kind of secure Windows mode on my laptop, but the others were not aware about this.
Now I know that the laptop had come like this directly from Dell, but for some reason the IT department did not know about it.
That button simply doesn't work. I forget the exact error message, but it was something generic and unhelpful. (Spoiler: none of the other solutions in the first few pages of search results worked, either.)