Not excusing any of this, but this has all been in the works since late 1990s / early 2000s. I recall when Intel announced their chips would have a specific ID and Microsoft said they were going to use that in Windows to stop piracy and whatever else they wanted to do.
There was a huge uproar about it and Intel backed down.
But bit by bit they included that technology in successive generations without really announcing it, or by calling it something else.
That was back around the time when I first started getting into Linux and it was largely because of that whole hubbub, even though I've never had a computer with an intel processor myself, but I assumed AMD would follow suit.
It took 20 some years but here we are, but with an even worse version of the original plan. Games and OSes are requiring you to enable that tracking to even use them now. It was the plan all along but now it's here and it isn't going to go away.
