alt Hacker NewsUnfortunately, 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.
You are forgetting that we are free to change and invent new rules whenever we want. PC manufacturers can change this. Some already have, like Lenovo (sorta) and Framework. It does not need to be the way that it has been.