alt Hacker NewsIt was a test they ran on Insiders channel to see how people reacted to them. It never mated it into GA, or for that matter the entire insiders channels... They'll feature gate things to some insiders users and A/B test them to see how the user response looks. There was a bit of an uproar at the time for those that saw them, including myself... I ditched windows altogether (except my assigned work laptop).
I think some form of ads made it into the release channel. I recently did a clean install of Windows 11 25H2 and I could not figure out how to get App Store ads out of the search results in the start menu. That and a game working better on Linux than Windows was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me and I installed Ubuntu.