[deanhills]

Have you by any chance signed in with a Microsoft account in Windows 10?

 No, I've tried my best to get out of it.  Right down to going into settings and turning off the option "let Microsoft advise you .... " and more.

The digital licenses are more like OEM licenses. They are bound mostly to your hardware. Too many hardware changes in the system will actually invalidate the license and one might have to use phone activation to revalidate the license key with the hope Microsoft allows it (it's automated so it probably works most of the time).

 OK got it.  Microsoft wants a committed relationship.     Makes sense however, and I think it is already great that Microsoft doesn't force you to pay for an upgrade on the same computer where you already had a Windows License that had already been paid for.  We're also long past the deadline.  I feel lucky I can still upgrade, and that the upgrade is so well put together by Microsoft, including setting one up with a digital license.  

Basically Windows 10 is mostly a free OS for the small man / private customer. You pay with your data however... Microsoft's biggest source of income are business customers. They pay a lot for the licenses and services. Azure, Windows 10 Enterprise, Windows Server 2016/2019 and so on and Office products. It's a whole different level compared to what you get as a private customer. The other big earning branch is Microsoft's hosting platform Azure and its services.

I guess I'm not going to be good for Microsoft from that point of view.  After the installation I unticked everything on offer except ability for voice recognition systems.  I probably will never use that, but just in case.  I also turned off most of Microsoft's notifications.  And must say something else I'm impressed with.  Microsoft actually listening to criticism and including ability to untick it's marketing notifications.

To be honest, so far nothing has happened during my test upgrade that made me feel like "this is not for me - get out of here".  So far I see it as an improvement, even for hardware that has been created for Windows 7.  I hope I'm not speaking too early though.  I still need to "experience" the major upgrade of my primary desktop computer.  Before that happens I want to see how the famous update system of Windows 10 Professional works on my test laptop.  From complaints I thought I would get regular popups and nailing the system down, but I haven't had a single update event yet. I remember with Windows 7 after its installation and hundreds of updates, and it never ended there, those multiple updates still continued for days after installation. So I'm delightfully surprised that after installation of Windows 10 Professional there hasn't been a single update event in the 4 days I've been on Windows 10. In the meanwhile, I've decided to go along with Microsoft's automatic updates, until the updates become uncomfortable.  And only act then.  I've always been on automatic updates any way, until in 2016 when Microsoft tried to force upgrade to Windows 10 through its updates in a sneaky and dishonest way. Before then, it's never been a big deal for me, and I thought essential for security.  Could be Microsoft has become sensitive to criticism and if the upgrade update process is a good example of what to expect of how the updates are implemented by Windows 10, I can definitely live with it.