At that same time, Microsoft started using your HDD serial as an identifier. Nowadays there are unique identifiers in most of your hardware, including the north bridge of your motherboard and the TPM that windows now requires.
Also, mobile devices got all kinds of unique identifiers from day 0.
People fought against that and actually won, 23 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10106870
Unfortunately, that may have been the only victory, as they slowly started introducing a lot of other stuff silently under the guise of "security".
"not secure by design" nowadays comes close to being a coveted feature
Absolutely. As the saying goes, "insecurity is freedom".