The best practice for installing free Windows applications is definitely to use something like https://ninite.com/ https://ninite.com/ which skips all crapware

The best practice for installing free Windows applications is definitely to use something like https://ninite.com/ https://ninite.com/ which skips all crapware for you. If a free utility isn't on ninite, I think extra hard about whether I really need it and then make sure I'm hypervigilant while going through the installer. The other mitigation, of course, is to pay for software. I don't worry about whether dbpoweramp is going to do something shady.