They’ve since relaxed a bit on the forced hardware upgrade part; you can install Win11 on ‘unsupported’ hardware now, you’ll basically just have click a prompt saying you’ll get no support, where initially it wouldn’t even let you do that.

The forced MS account login is very much an issue with the consumer SKUs and the Enterprise/IoT SKUs still let you use a local account. Similarly, LTSC in particular is barren on the bloat front, while the consumer SKUs and even the non-LTSC Enterprise and IoT SKUs aren’t much better in this regard, come loaded with bloat.