I would have said the same 5 years ago but now macOS is quite bad itself. If you follow their lead (click blue) you'll end up setting up an iCloud account, syncing your life to them, enabling Apple Intelligence, telemetry, and a load of other shit.

Then you get to the desktop and your dock has 30 icons in it already, some of which require subscription, and it's too full to understand what each one is.

And don't get me started on the default over-inflated display scaling that makes great screens look like they're from 2012!

People say that but it's not really hard to turn things off.

It's not really hard to turn things off on Windows either.

You hear people saying it's a problem but you discount what they say because you know better yourself?

I'm perfectly capable of setting up macOS to my liking, but I think it's important to consider all users. The abuse of default settings is quite rampant.

I say that because I've been using macOS for the last decade and haven't found clicking the occasional 'no' on would you like to pay for iCloud much of a burden.

Also my 89 yr old mum has switched to mac and not had that particular issue. Some other issues like MS Outlook not importing her 40GB email file which had built up over a couple of decades on Windows, but not ads etc.

MacOS is less overtly distasteful than Windows about the advertising, but not fundamentally different. Consider the incredibly sticky notifications to get you to use Apple services (like icloud) and the number of preinstalled apps that show ads (like stocks).

I think a lot of Microsoft's fumbles over the years have been bad attempts at copying Apple, including the onedrive pushiness.