[RonanTheGrey]

There's a companion setting, "Configured Connected User Experiences and Telemetry" that if you give it a valid hostname:port, it will send telemetry to that host instead of to Microsoft. Kind of a larf but spin up a basic Node server on some port, use a fake domain via C:\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and point the GP setting to that domain+port and it'll blackhole the network requests (you do need the local server running because if the request fails, it will be sent to Microsoft).

Overall I agree it's silly we even need to do this.