Every single one of those things happened on Windows 10. No, I absolutely did not do anything to instigate it.
Microsoft is malicious and has an extremely long history of being shitbags adding aggressively invasive features for the sole purpose of spyware and advertising.
Microsoft being shitbags aside… no argument there.
You say you didn’t do anything… but if not everyone has the issue… then something is being done to cause it, whether you want to admit it or not.
Most of those were major “feature” additions. If you didn’t experience them you weren’t using windows.
If you didn’t have settings reverted, you didn’t have sane settings that blocked Window’s obscenely invasive data gathering. Pretty much every single one of them had articles written at the time, because they absolutely did happen to everyone. You just weren’t paying attention. None of them was in any way obscure.