Setting up online accounts and allowing login via online accounts is fine. Forcing the use of an online account to use an operating system is not OK. They are actively blocking workarounds people use to setup their machine with a local account only.

Providing an easy (perhaps upon installation or first login) method to enable full disk encryption is a good thing. Automatically doing it without user intervention is not.

I would say that enabling it by default and offering a way to disable it before it happens on a laptop makes sense. I have bitlocker enabled on my laptop. But I cannot see any real reason to put it on my desktop. The number of cases where bitlocker on my desktop makes sense are too few to bother with the potential for problems it brings.

The two things are also linked, I suspect they will tie in your bitlocker unlock keys to the microsoft account they force you to login with on computer/windows setup. Should you lose access through any means you could lose access to your account, you’re one misclick/hardware change away from bricking your system.

I also wonder, say for example your Microsoft account becomes banned/deleted through some obscure TOS violation and your PC doesn’t have any local accounts configured. Are you locked out of your PC?

I’m not anti microsoft. I’m anti a lot of their recent actions, and cynical about their overall intentions regarding them.