1. Great it works for you. It only works sometimes when it feels like it for me, most of the time it hangs and can't find the program or file I'm trying to open and goes to Websearch. I've had this problem for years on every single machine I installed it on and it's not fixed yet.
2. Yeah, that's the thing, why do I have to do that in the first place? Sometimes they're placeholders but most of the time they aren't. Every time I do a major windows update or run updates after a fresh install it
downloads OneDrive, Xing, Candy Crush, and some other random apps.
3, It doesn't happen that often to be fair but usually it's just some audio drivers that never got updated cause the company went bankrupt or something.
4. It's not a myth, Windows 10 uses swapfiles very aggressively and does tons of caching in the background which is fine on SSDs but it hits HDDs way too hard and they end up being too slow.
but this is kinda offtopic anyway