And then hardly anything will work, so whats the point ?

If your system doesn’t have a TPM chip, you can still emulate it in softtware, but then everything will run like molasses, so again basically poitnless.

Its to stop idiots downloading cat videos and infecting the system with ransomware.

if your sys admin keeps TPM on - and they would have to be nuts to turn it off - you’ll be opening an account.

Sure, but then pretty well nothing will work, so what’s the point ?

Well they only just dropped support for Win7 and that came out in 2009.