It's amazing that Microsoft is spending time on a creepy tool to record all your activity when it still can't figure out how to prevent Windows from waking your laptop while in your backpack (or not rebooting overnight without permission because of some stupid update).
Back in the day I used to keep a VMWare install with multiple versions of Windows for assorted needs – just stopped post-M1, and trying to avoid going back 😆
I moved to having a local VirtualBox install for this reason
Have VMs of various flavors of linux/windows for various needs that I can clone/delete on a whim and lose nothing
Allows for the removal of VMWare from the environment (they're going full-on Boeing at this point)
Same
But ever since version 5, VMWare has shit itself and then set itself on fire (I see no chance at change of this coming down the pike, either)
Thus, lots of folks looking at alternatives. Hyper V is nice, but its windows specific. Proxmox, etc
I like VirtualBox for one-off smaller installs