Probably, if they wanted to. The historical writing is on the wall that they don’t want to, though, as part of whatever their business strategy is. Fear of legal complications due to overtly being a for-profit commercial enterprise might also have something to do with it.

Microsoft is already quite infamous for e.g. going so far as to license third party .zip decompressing code to build into Windows Explorer rather than develop their own, code which apparently nobody in Redmond could be bothered to understand and thus to this very day the .zip archive handling capabilities of Explorer remain frozen and time from the XP era and so rinky-dink that they pale in comparison to commandline tools from the '90s. That’s let alone compared to something like 7-Zip.

This also raises the issue of having to maintain said code over subsequent releases and continually update it to support evolving standards, etc., which not only isn’t free but presents no obvious mechanism for extracting any revenue from anybody to offset that cost. The current plan of simply outsourcing the entire problem to its rightsholders and passing the licensing cost directly to the consumer allows Microsoft to handily wash their hands of the entire affair, enabling them to devote more resources to trying to shoehorn Copilot AI into the character map or the registry editor, or whatever the fuck.

VLC relies on open source media decoding libraries and projects. Thanks to the mechanisms and math behind many video/audio encoding schemes being public knowledge due to whitepapers on the topics in question being available and so forth, these can be reverse engineered by dedicated nerds who are way better at this sort of thing than me. As long as you’re not explicitly circumventing DRM there’s nothing the owners of proprietary codecs can do to anyone making a compatible decoding library in a clean room fashion, especially as mentioned elsewhere nobody is charging any money in the process. You’re licensing the code, not the method.

I imagine this is at least partially why the Jean-Baptiste Kempf is so adamantly against selling, monetizing, or allowing the VLC project to be bought out in any way whatsoever.

In my case this is literally true, because the IoT editions of Windows don’t even come with a bundled media player (nor a bundled photo viewer other than classic Paint, for what it’s worth).

This has always been an option, but up until now has required changing a setting in group policy (pro/enterprise) or making a registry tweak (home). I would wager that they’re simply exposing this policy setting to end users within the regular UI.

In the local group policy editor, it’s located in:

Local Computer Policy \ Computer Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Search

Do Not Allow Web Search → Enabled 
Don’t search the web or display web results in search → Enabled

This also works with Windows 10, despite the article focusing on Windows 11.

There are corresponding registry entries for these but I don’t know where off the top of my head since I run the Enterprise IoT version and can just use the group policy editor. (Pretty much all local policies simply twiddle the relevant registry bits for you.)