Windows licences haven't been free for decades. I still have my 95 & 98 licence keys. It's just manufacturers include their heavily discounted price in the cost of the PC.

I certainly didn't pay to upgrade to 11.

They had free upgrades from 7 to 10 for a while too. 10 really pissed me off with insisting you have an account tied to everything you do in an OS before you can use it, and forcing you to accept advertising options. It can go fuck itself over that. That's really taking the piss!

The promised ads in 11 have, for me at least (touch wood), not materialised.

I just pointed the primary DNS to a Pi running Pi-hole. In the end it decided 10 is a f'kin annoying downgrade from 7 so wiped it and ran with 7 for a bit. Then installed Ubuntu with 7 as a VM. Then only ran the VM when I had to. Now I'm bedbound, the PC downstairs so use a Pi 5 in the bedroom. 😕

I choose the path of least resistance. 😂