That first article is just a random journalist (user) Windows rant. I'd give it a 90% chance the root cause was user error.
The second mentions:
1) Drivers being replaced, which is often cited as the overwhelming contributing factor of system instability. It was a huge factor specifically when the driver model changed in Vista and shotty 3rd party drivers is often credited as the single biggest reason Vista flopped. They're anal about drivers, but MS provides ways to prevent drivers from being updated automatically. They list printers being uninstalled as a separate thing, but probably same root cause. Printers and their software hold the top ranking on the "WTF is all this shit?" Scale.
Ads turned back on? Never happened on any of these systems. There might have been some feature that was added in an early release (both articles were written in 2017), but if there was, it was a toggle in the settings to disable it.
Default apps being reset actually DID happen to me once, now that I think about it. It's literally a 5 second fix, which is why I forgot about it.
That article also links to MakeUseOf articles that promote installing 3rd party apps to do things like redirect Cortana, set default programs, etc. Gee, use some rando internet person's hack to change default apps and at the next update the default apps are reset to default? Must be Microsoft's fault. Let's mess with Cortana, which can be used to recommend (advertise) apps and services by examining the user's history (telemetry). What? All the telemetry tweaks and ad settings have changed. OMG MS you so bad! Sorry, M$ you so bad! (Gotta have that late 90s childish Developers Developers Developers rage.)
The overwhelming takeaways are:
A) If you're going to spend hours of your life at the computer, spend 30 minutes looking over the settings for each major release, which happens once every year or so. Same goes for your phones/tablets.
B) Use the tools provided to tweak first and resort to 3rd party hacks only if they're reversible, you know exactly what they do, and you could perform the same changes manually.