The answer is still the same. Don't they get the lesson? People don't want generic "weather" information if they're NOT going out, stock information if they don't invest, inbox headers in a 200px space where a notifications number could suffice, events in town when they are going to work. It's not they HAVE to open an app to get forcefed ads. It's that they WANT to need an app to get ads. Otherwise there's no need to clutter up the empty "desk" metaphore THEY created, with litter.
People generally don't spend time roaming around within the OS, or standing on desktop screen. I sometimes goes many days before I even lay eyes on my wallpaper. 90% of the time I open my laptop, browser is already open and I get to work.
Widgets are and always were a gimmick. User behavior won't change without a strong need. I don't think anybody need any widget. Nobody will miss them if they are gone.
Not necessarily. I've got a sidebar taking up otherwise unused space on this way-too-wide screen that shows memory usage, CPU usage, network traffic, top processes, hardware temps, and a pile of other useful stuff. It's incredibly useful to be able to glance over and see what's going on under the hood if something appears slow, or hung, or other odd things are happening.
Yes, I too hate all notifications; I don't want to have anything pushed in my face; if I need something or some information I will go look for it.
That said you can do many things with tray apps and tooltips, if you really need to. I have been making Windows tray apps lately; they're nice to make and to use.
I wonder if there would be an interest for a tray app that would pull some specific (configurable) information at regular intervals, that would be discoverable via mouseover?
Even after hours of installing third party tools I never heard of before from the internet (secure thing to do right?) I still get a occasional ad to my (single purpose and only Windows) desktop and still each time question why and how anyone would think that's a good idea, or a good place to advertise.
On Windows 10 there's a way to change the license to "Enterprise" (in the shady corner of GitHub), and then you can apply policy to not have it show shit.
Google is fucking obnoxious now too. Pixel phone, swipe left in the launcher and you get "trending" or whatever it's called. And then they saw that the auto-complete dropdown is also real estate, "hey do you want to see trending searches? We're sure you do!"
On my Pixel 8a, a swipe right on the home screen shows the "google app", I don't like that so I disabled it (home settings).