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The article is talking about the initial setup experience, where you could put in a fake email to bypass the requirement to sign in with a Microsoft account.
don't you need one at that point to tie the windows activation to your account?
Microsoft does sync activation keys to your account but the license is also embedded in the firmware in recent prebuilt laptops and desktops, so you don't need a Microsoft account to activate.
I absolutely hate that. What's wrong with just entering a key? They act like it's difficult or they're doing something truly impressive when it's obvious they're getting way more out of users having an account
Granted it was a few months ago, but I seem to recall a command prompt keystroke and a command line command that allowed skipping online install during setup.
I don't think Microsoft can reasonably block opening the command prompt and bypassing the OOBE without breaking a lot of other things, but them removing the simpler workarounds is a pretty obvious attempt to get more people to sign in with a Microsoft account.