I have auto ZFS snapshots, the choice of 5+ competent desktop environments, every piece of software I need and use (including Halo, emulators, etc), an immutable OS, rollbacks to nearly any point in time, have never, ever, ever had anything "break", and have never remotely seen an advertisement or nagware, ever. Not to mention that my NixOS skills directly translate to running servers the way they're meant to be run. With my recently setup zrepl, I also have an exact replica of all of my data on a portable SSD. I can travel with a single laptop and know that I can literally get it back to its identical state in about 15 minutes, should it ever be broken or stolen. Entire classes of anxieties eliminated in a way that other OSes can't even dream of, on top of complete control, and again no nagware.
It's about tradeoffs and I'd much rather put up some up front investment and then never think about it again. Go re-install Windows and watch how long it takes to disable all the telemetry, un-privacy features, default browsers, application and desktop configuration, etc. And then realize for maybe 3x that cost, you could learn something new and move past all of this nonsense. Or just keep dealing with Windows Updates and Bing shoved everywhere it doesn't belong.