To be fair to the new owners the previous ones never mentioned the lifetime subscriptions existed and they were sinking the company. Probably the reason the original owners sold in the first place.

I don’t think anyone’s ever said Linux is user friendly for non technical people. Atleast not earnestly or without hard coping

You don’t have to join a domain, it just skips the Microsoft account login and goes to create a local account

Nope, you need an internet connection to get past initial setup. Unless you use pro, there you can select to domain join computer instead and it’ll let you create a local account