I don’t trust Microsoft’s motivations, but these are all important considerations you bring up.

The lowest step of pushiness is a tray icon. Cinnamon did(does?) it like this. You have an exclamation point in the tray if you have updates available, otherwise it’s a green check mark on a shield. I thought this was an elegantly simple and effective solution though, as you point out, easy to ignore.

On the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft have gone to the extreme: you will upgrade, you have limited options to defer, you will backup to our cloud. Updates show up and you get to be surprised every upgrade cycle when something that was formerly working is broken.

I will always opt for freedom for myself and others, but I imagine a middle ground that holds the hands of non-technical users would look something like the warning when you access about:config in Firefox. “Here be dragons!”

Ultimately, on a normie-focused OS it may even be useful to provide the user with information about backups and let them choose. "Having a backup reduces your likelihood of losing your cat memes by %. By confirming below you acknowledge that cloud backup will not be set up. To avoid data loss, please follow the 3-2-1 backup methodology (link).

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