alt Hacker NewsThis is such a boomer coded 'deal with it' take. The manufacturer is going to charge you a premium for the software license. If you never intend to use that license, it's completely reasonable to think that we could live in a world where you could uncheck a box and avoid that altogether.
Unfortunately, in practice most PC vendors get paid to bundle a giant pile of bloatware/malware/adware on the system, and they eagerly accept those payments because PCs are a low-margin business. So if your refund actually represented the amount the vendor spent, you'd end up paying them more to have a system without Windows.