Very unlikely that it's a lot of users from at least anecdotal experience (I used to help a lot of regular people with IT a few years ago). Default settings ar

Very unlikely that it's a lot of users from at least anecdotal experience (I used to help a lot of regular people with IT a few years ago). Default settings are very decisive in how most people set up their entire OS really. Very few people ever enter the settings app to customize things to their liking - most just assume any friction that the OS throws at them is just something the magical black box that does the computer things does and the only thing the user wants is to make it go away. Not understand it, just make it go away. That's what a lot of Google's attempts to become your default {browser,search engine} is also aimed at - irritate a regular user just enough with the idea that if they accept it, all the nagging about that subject goes away. Most users don't fully understand their OS enough to get what decision they're making, so they end up with Google as their defaults. (This is also super prevalent on Android - try denying say, the Youtube app, access to your notifications. The app will ask for notificaton permissions every single time. Google really wants access to your data and "no" isn't an acceptable answer to them. If this was a real human, you'd probably call that out as being creepy, but people tolerate it with Google for some reason.)