macOS is absolutely awful about iCloud nag. If you try and use a Mac without an iCloud account, you'll get neverending popups and notifications begging you to go online. It's nearly as bad as Windows.
Neither GNOME nor KDE get anywhere near as bad. It's really only these commercial "holier than thou" operating systems that think they know best.
I haven't experienced this but I see you're the second comment pointing that out. I've been using macbooks for work for a long time and never once used iCloud nor do I remember seeing a confusing prompt. But I also rarely upgrade my machine.
With Windows, a regular seemingly normal update appeared almost as if I was upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 and it prompted me to do the backup to OneDrive. I accepted it because I was worried the update to Windows 11 would get screwed up. After the update completed it was just a normal update after all and there was no need for me to accept that onedrive backup!
iCloud nags appear in the Settings app and Notifications menu. When you are signed out, Apple will assault you with notifications (that you must disabled with a script) until you log in: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250786208?sortBy=rank
I've got my fair share of horror-stories with both OSes, I switched between dailying Mojave and Windows 10 for a big portion of my life. Nothing will ever top updating to Catalina, booting up Ableton Live and seeing all my paid plugins go from "working fine" to "completely unsupported" in the span of an update.
I see. I think part of the reason why I don't see this (or don't remember it?) is I treat my work computer differently than my home computer. For my work computer, I honestly only restart my Mac maybe once every few months and never install updates. By the time I'm 1-2 OS releases out (usually when the battery starts to fail), my company gives me the latest macbook.
For the people in the office who use Windows they start dropping off randomly during the day as their computer decides to start installing updates during critical times.
During pandemic I started playing with smart home stuff and since I'm already within apple playgrounds I've got homepod mini since they stripped ipads from hub feature. After configuring the speaker I had apple music ad for about 3 months at the top of settings where ios software update notifications appears.
Its everywhere. You get nagged constantly for Apple music on your iphone too. My dystopian prediction is that in the near future, corporations will just garnish your wages so they don't have to do this.
Neither GNOME nor KDE get anywhere near as bad. It's really only these commercial "holier than thou" operating systems that think they know best.