Windows comes in many flavours. The most "just stop it, okay?" version is the Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC).

It's like the Windows you used to like, back in the XP days. No Xbox gaming bar or Minecraft. Minimal (no?) telemetry. No forced updates every 6 months that break things randomly.

In my line of work we used it a lot for things like virtual desktop fleets with thousands or even tens of thousands of instances Why? Because the "normal" builds would every now and then just 'decide' to force update themselves despite our best efforts to stop that. All at once. On an ephemeral environment, where the machines would reset on boot, and then try to apply the forced update again. And again, over and over...

Some Microsoft manager wanted their KPIs met, so they just.. rammed something through. Fuck everyone running a VDI fleet, a billboard, a kiosk, a test environment, or anything that needs any kind of stability at all. Big man at Microsoft needs a bonus for that new Tesla!

This was common practice in our line of business. LTSC or failure, those are the options.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, whenever they turned up to a customer site, would just keep harping on about how LTSC is not intended for users, how it's "bad", and how the six-monthly releases provide Enhanced Experiences(tm) or whatever. They would stop just short of calling us unprofessional in front of our customers. Just.

It was the most absurd thing to watch happen. The disconnect between Microsoft and their customers is almost comical now...

Though, if possible, consider using GNU/Linux whenever possible - distros like Debian have historically had little controversies around them, even package popularity metrics are presented as a choice to you during install time: https://popcon.debian.org/

Certain other distros like Ubuntu have a bit more controversy surrounding them, for example, the snaps package mechanism which takes away the user's control over updates by default, though that's more of a security hole and a stability risk, rather than aggressive telemetry related (unless it's introduced by the package creators, a la Audacity's plans that were later rolled back https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835).

Of course, if you truly care about your privacy and open software, you might as well use a fully GNU distribution, such as Trisquel, though there are factors like hardware compatibility and software availability which could pose challenges in such cases: https://trisquel.info/