Ctrl+F "In case you want to take action on your own" in the article.

I missed that! I didn't read the whole thing, it was too long and the article ends with things that do not work and somehow I presumed there's nothing that works, then.

yep answer is at very bottom. WPAD can be disabled via registry.

Run this from an elevated Command Prompt...

  REG ADD HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WinHttpAutoProxySvc /v Start /t REG_DWORD /d 4 /f