It was way worse back then. Nowadays you can actually remove it. Back then they hooked IE into numerous core UI things like the desktop wallpaper and file manager, so any attempt at actually removing it completely fucked your system

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/uninstall-microsoft-edge-windows-11

It’s not impossible, but they try pretty hard to prevent it.

• But that was IE, now they’re back at it again

Back then, the US government was three corporations in a trenchcoat, *since then they shed the trenchcoat…