You did not misremembered it. They tried to make it difficult, got backlashed, then took a step back. All of it before Win11 was widely distributed, so some people never had to deal with it.
With that said. MS still looking ways to try forcing you to use Edge. Recently, all of your Chrome tabs just got reopen into Edge, “due to a bug”.
This is the second times Apple got caught red-handed for stealing, and there is no doubt there were many more cases where they got away with it.
Yeah. Twitter has always been a shit show, under Mush it just gets more unhinged and right-winged.