Me too brother, but I disagree with your assessment on value
An non-blacklisted residential IP address with reasonable throughput is valuable in and of itself. DDOS botnets, proxies to bypass geo blocks or to obfuscate illicit traffic, etc. Also your gaming PC could be used for distributed compute workloads of compromised, usually crypto mining.
Any hardware/connection has value if it’s “free”. It’s just a numbers game beyond that.
For now, ctt winutil does a pretty good job at removing the cruft. I’ve long since switched to debian for my daily driver, but as a remote-access sunshine host for games that require kernel level anticheat, it’s surprisingly usable.
For anyone looking to keep windows around in some capacity, I strongly recommend it. https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
Every packet you send/receive relies on passive security. Your nic drivers, the driver kernel model, all of the userland applications that sit on top of it. I get that in practical terms, your firewall will do a lot of the heavy lifting but there are passive rce vulnerabilities in previous unsupported versions of Windows that are trivially exploitable today.
Even if you trust their intent to not misuse your data, there are now a lot of live rpc hooks into your operating system, controllable by anyone who can compromise their azure implementation, which has happened at least twice in recent memory. If the data never leaves your device, and they didn’t have a way in, they wouldn’t have those things to lose in the first place.
The interdependency itself, regardless of intent, is inherently more dangerous than the previous separate paradigm that used to exist.
Your dad probably got lucky, and your router’s firewall probably did a lot of the heavy lifting. If you were to connect a win 2000/XP computer to the internet today without a firewall between, it would be compromised in minutes (there are loads of videos of people demoing this).
While I don’t have proof that 7 would be the same, I strongly suspect it would be the same. 10 will get there soon too. Firewalls will stop most of the low hanging fruit, but an application that bridges connections through the firewall are that much more vulnerable to exploitations that won’t be integrated by your running kernel.
They won’t brick it, but you can bet that a lot of people are sitting on unreleased 0-days for win10. It will likely be dangerous to connect to the internet on day 1.
When ML training farms run out of new text to train on, “they” may very well want your original writing too…