It's a really fundamental UX issue - imagine you open a book, it's got random half pages of text, smeared print, blocks of colour; what's your impression of the production quality? Are you expecting it to be well edited?
Or you put on the radio and the first track is random snippets of talking/music/sound at various volumes.
People put luxury goods in expensive packaging for a reason ... and no, _I_ don't like expensive packaging.
(Now, actually a book like that would be intriguing to me, but ...)
That's how things work since ages, Windows had mode switches at least until Windows XP. It's quite normal if you think of it: the computer turns on, does some basic self-testing, then enhances it's capabilities, the OS starts and activates more and more functionality.
I know it looks very polished when all this is hidden. But when something stops working, the repair option might then be hidden as well though. The UX of having a dysfunctional system for days or weeks is even worse. In fact this is the reason I switched to Linux, everything is so much more predictable and transparent. Of course stuff looks more stitched together and sometimes things are harder to get running. But once things are set up properly, it just works and works.
Windows has improved a lot over the years, but still, if you keep an installation over time, you end up having more and more spyware and crappy software on your system, even on the Mac it's advisable to reinstall everything from time to time. This means backing up all data, not forgetting anything and also taking care of App reinstallations. For anyone using Computers for things they depend on, this is nightmarish UX.
Basic internet and computer hygiene makes it incredibly easy, even inherent, in avoidng spyware/adware/malware and crappy software. Now some people who don’t do that might find nuking it all to be easier than trying to uninstall everything, that’s valid, but Unless you corrupted something on a system wide scale, clean installs are a relic from when they were a blanket solution way back in the day when all software was a lot more unstable, many years ago. I’ve been running the same install of Windows, upgraded numerous times, with nary and issue nowadays just thanks the the above best practices. Same with MacOS.
This tends to be the general sentiment in both communities (outside of people who recommend that cause it’s all they know, but I wouldn’t listen to them regardless) if you keep good computer/internet hygiene practices and barring any widespread corruption/systemic malware/other external factors.
Aside from that, I’m always a huge advocate for the polished UX. As long as the options aren’t removed, the users who need them will be able to use them perfectly fine, everyone else won’t be offput by them, especially when the need for clean installs is only necessary for specific use cases as I mentioned before and doesn’t come up often at all.
Or you put on the radio and the first track is random snippets of talking/music/sound at various volumes.
People put luxury goods in expensive packaging for a reason ... and no, _I_ don't like expensive packaging.
(Now, actually a book like that would be intriguing to me, but ...)