The only ones I've seen with masks the last few years are Asians in airports when I'm traveling, and they wore those even before covid so I'm not sure it's covid related.
The biggest pull keeping people on Windows, outside of shear inertia, is content creation and gaming
You're forgetting the huge and much more lucrative market that is businesses. We literally can't switch away from windows because every single piece of engineering software we use only exists for windows. We can't program anything, configure anything, deploy anything or service anything if we're not running windows. Oh, a VM solution you suggest? wrong!, because the drivers needed to interface with the hardware are wonky as hell as is but inside VMs it gets the job borked half the time making my job unnecessary frustrating.
We have a massive south facing side filled with windows (and two double glass doors), covers about 80% of the living area, all blinds mounted inside. We still had 9°C lower temps inside compared to outside during the worst hours of the heat wave. Yes 28°C is still hot, but much better than the 37°C we had outside.
That would just make it 5% of a vast majority, nearing 100%,, so still only a small amount of users.
I get what you're saying, but when something is only used by the small demographic that is "power users", it is not a beloved feature of the userbase as a whole.
modern Scandinavian homes have huge uncovered well insulated windows to allow the sun in as a free radiator during winter
Which of course is why you pull down the blinds to limit heating of surfaces inside during the day and let the insulation keep heat out.
Due to the high insulation this doesn't dissipate during the night in a heatwave, so it doesn't matter if the outside temp is 18°
Which is why you of course open windows during the night to cool things off when temps are lower.
it's not perfect, and helps less with high nighttime temps, but it makes the proper insulated home work with you and not against you as much as possible.
Beloved feature is only actually utilised by 5% of your users?
I mean, there is a pretty strong argument that if 95% of users don't use a function, then it is not actually beloved and just more of a niche thing that the vast majority don't care about.
You can care about minimizing data center construction because of pollution etc., and not give a shit about people that it coincidentally affects in a more direct way than you. These are not mutually exclusive opinions.
You do know that "hitting the wall" is a physiological thing and not a mental thing right? Like you've physically depleted glycogen storage in your muscles causing the severe fatigue we reference as "hitting the wall". Mental fortitude will not make the muscles work well again when that happens, no matter how much you have.
You can easily get several models capable of more than that now, but they're pricey.