You may be right, perhaps it was Windows 8 to Windows 10. But even in the days of XP, upgrade nags were already in effect, and one keypress or mouse click at the wrong time (when the popup appeared) could send you down that road. Unless you already anticipated it ahead of time (from past experiences) and went through the settings and disabled automatic update checking.
The overall intent and attitude matters more to me than the details, and the general intent of Microsoft (and Apple, and Gnome, and Ubuntu, and many others) seems to be "we know how your desktop should look and operate better than you do."
This is completely the opposite of what I want, which is to have a workstation which is configured to facilitate my work, where nothing changes without my explicit REQUEST.
