it wouldn't be the first time a Windows version bombs so bad in favor of its predecessor that they have to roll things back immediately, so we have a pretty clear picture of what that would look like.

The question is, would they care? End user business is a rather small position on their balance sheet I'd guess, it's rather big support contracts and Azure. Let the individual users complain for a while, they've eaten all the shit over the years anyways, they'll swallow another turd. My current employer justified switching from a Linux based system to Windows which took huge efforts with huge amounts of copium ("they've given in and understood our demands!") yet I bet more issues will arrive when Windows 10 support expires.

Businesses won't switch anyways, they never did in huge numbers, and private users are good at complaining and sometimes even holding out on old versions but once storage gets encrypted by ransomware that got in through unpatched security flaws in their no longer supported version of Windows, they'll pay up anyways.

But I guess MS just says this idea out loud now so that people can get enraged and then they'll do something less shitty and everyone will be like "we won! There's no subscription!"