geographomics

It is a security measure, as it involves authentication through the series of knocks. It's a weak security measure on its own, so you obviously wouldn't want to rely on port knocking by itself, but it does have utility in preventing an attacker from discovering the service through a simple port scan.

I don't quite understand why you're saying it adds nothing at all.

If the port knocking was obscuring an unauthenticated root shell then you would have a good point, but this is a defence in depth measure that adds to the security. It helps because it's one more hurdle for an attacker to bypass.

You can uninstall it with an administrative Powershell using this command:

    Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.WindowsStore | Remove-AppxPackage

Would this not continue to work?

The USA has a lot of catching up to do with the rest of the world then.

Six weeks paid leave is paltry compared to the vast majority of countries.

After the initial period of adaptation, I found it actually increased productivity. Perhaps it was just preventing already-established bad habits that arise from having the internet constantly available.

On the topic of work environment: in one job I worked at, we had the Internet machines completely separated from the work machines. If you needed to check something you had to physically walk over to the Internet desk. Great for focussing on the task at hand without distraction, and considering carefully what information you need.