Andy Young, an ex-Microsoft senior software engineer, posted a message on X/Twitter bemoaning that even with his $1,600 Core i9 CPU and 128 GB of RAM, Windows...
You did not misremembered it. They tried to make it difficult, got backlashed, then took a step back. All of it before Win11 was widely distributed, so some people never had to deal with it.
With that said. MS still looking ways to try forcing you to use Edge. Recently, all of your Chrome tabs just got reopen into Edge, "due to a bug".