Assuming this is on an android phone with the normal Google Play Services on it then you should expect that Google can theoretically read anything that appears on it. It’s probably not that sinister though, I don’t imagine anything is being sent away and logged (though it theoretically could be!), there’s probably just some process which reads every incoming notification and if it thinks it sounds like a task then it offers you the prompt. Is this some setting you haven’t disabled in Google Assistant?
I’d definitely recommend WSL, wasn’t to hard to set up on my own machine so unless you’ve got a locked down work machine then probably worth the effort
Depending on your Linux distro you can manage entirely without using the terminal, there are plenty of graphical package managers. My point is that if you do need to do command line stuff then a bash terminal is much more user-friendly than the horrors of cmd or powershell!
It’s also not cheaper when you consider the cost and limited choice of console games compared to the almost limitless choice of things to play on a PC, many of which are free or can often be heavily discounted. Also I hear your can use your PC for other things too!
It’s surprising to hear this; given reddit’s current mass-enshittification I don’t expect to see a change that both improves user experience and reduces the money they’re making. Clearly they’ve got something more sinister planned, but awards were a blight on the reddit experience and had I not already left I’d appreciate this change (for now!)