Yes, I have. I installed it 2 weeks before it was released to the public as part of the Windows Insider program and then again on several machines after release and, most recently, in the Creator's Update. Until there was a huge backlash against MS, all of those things were opt-out and turned on by default, including Cortana and the ink features. Apple does not turn any of these on by default, nor have they ever, and you have to opt-in to those features to use them.

Spotlight and Safari send anonymous data back that is parsed and separated so that it can't be used to identify the machine, user, or account that they came from. That's wildly different from the MS approach even after all the changes made on MS's end.

You can turn off spotlight and safari and siri suggestions and there should be no traffic to Apple after that.

Yes, Microsoft has a long history of providing user privacy and control settings and then ignoring or reverting them.

I thought I had read that there were ways to shut off all the MS telemetry via hidden settings or registry changes.

Cortana can also be disabled by quickly deleting or renaming a file somewhere, after killing a process. Specifics can be googled.

I know he is, but that's not the same thing as what he's implying and, even then, Apple's solution is opt-in while Microsoft's was on by default.

Messages are not currently stored on Apple servers unless you enable iCloud backup.