>does this seem user-friendly? seems deliberately hostile to me (though par for the course nowadays)

I recently set up my old 2009 iMac [0], and it tickled-me-pink that even the Microsoft Office installer was opt-in by default (i.e. the telemetry option was OFF by default, with the installer asking if you wanted to opt-in).

[0] this was about a month ago, right before the ArtCraft's reverse-engineering of Adobe's products; I restored this iMac simply to run my legally-purchased copy of Photoshop CS4 (a non-subscription edition circa 2006)