True, any preboot password method (even fully software) will be sufficient to prevent data exposure when a laptop is stolen.
The whole TPM + secure boot thing is more to prevent evil maid attacks where a laptop is messed with (eg installing a bootloader that intercepts the password) and then placing it back in the user's possession so they can be tricked into entering the password.
That whole scenario is extremely far-fetched for home users. Laptops get stolen but then they're gone.
I would very likely notice.
1. Go into your room and screw around with the boot loader to somehow give me unencrypted access to your laptop after you login next time.
2. Go into your room. Take your laptop. Put an identical looking laptop in place that runs software that boots and looks identical. Have it send me all of your password attempts over WiFi to my van in the parking lot.
I'm going with option 2 every time. I have your original device. I have your password. TPM, SecureBoot, or whatever is irrelevant at this point.
Legend goes that security oriented people will visually customize their machines with stickers (and their associated aging patina) and all kinds of digital cues on the different screens just to recognize if anything was changed.
MS chose to impose TPM because it allows encryption without interactive password typing (BitLocker without PIN or password which is what most machines are running). That's it. The users get all the convenience of not having to type extra passwords when the machine starts, and some (not all) of the security offered by encryption. Some curious thief can't just pop your drive into their machine and check for nudes. The TPM is not there to protect against NSA, or proverbial $5 wrench attacks but as a thick layer of convenience over the thinner layer of security.
Repeat until password is extracted.
TPM means the system can boot and then do face login or whatever using the user's password in exactly one place.
This is as much as most users will tolerate. And it also means Microsoft account recovery can work to unlock a forgotten password.
The whole point is Microsoft don't want user devices to ever be trivially bypassed, regardless of how unlikely that is (probably more likely then you think though).
These things are everywhere: they're used by small businesses, unsophisticated users etc. but the story which will be written if anything happens because the disk was imaged sometime will be "how this small business lost everything because of a stolen Windows laptop" and include a quote about how it wouldn't have happened on a MacBook.
I've been using bog-standard FDE for as long as I can remember. One extra password entry per bootup for almost-perfect security seems like great value to me.
Also for technical reasons, Windows can't do the fancy one login/password screen (which assumes a file-level encryption, which is how it is implemented nowadays to support multiple users [1] [2]). This is due to Windows software that are expecting that everything is an ordinary file (unlike Apple which don't care on that aspect and Android which has compartmentalized storage). Even if we have an EFS-style encryption here, it will be incompatible with enterprise authentication solutions.
1: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/encryption-and-data...
2: https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/encryption
That's part of the reason. Another part is BigCo spamming the users asking for biometrics or whatever the current promotion-driver is, making opting out hard to find, and using their position of authority to assert that it's "more secure" (for your personal threat model no less, nice to be able to offload thought to a corporation).
The more recently released Trezor wallets are still new, and Yubikey 5C will probably be used in many places anyway just because of the keyring and no need for the usb-c cable.
In fact in many cases a preboot password is safer. Because the comms between the TPM and the OS can often be sniffed. And if the TPM doesn't need validation because it hands off its keys, it can be bypassed that way.
Again not really something that consumers have to worry about, but it's not quite difficult anymore to pull this off.
