Couldn’t you also make a throwaway ms account?

I could, but them I’m up a creek later if I need to use any recovery functionality, as it all ties back to that MS cloud account.

It’s certainly possible to get working, disable all of the cloud saves and telemetry, and then just save the MS account in a password vault for later.

But all of that is much more work than clicking “next” a few times in the Linux Mint installer. ¯_(ツ)_/¯