Office 365 "The fine print" popup message - is it legitimate?

This time the culprit appears to update for windows 10 KB4023057 2.47.0.0.  (it slipped in 3 days age).  I rolled back to the system restore point prior to that patch and the fine print popup disappeared.  I did have to to reinstall a firefox and  antivirus update.

Why MS is so determined to needlessly annoy the heck out of users?  

While the popup is gone, MS still has managed to insert a worm into up my desktop Office install - in the upper left hand corner of MS office programs my name appears with a yellow triangle - "ACCOUNT ERROR.  Sorry we can't get to your account right now. To fix this, please sign in again."  WTF, I'm not using 365, I don't want to use 365 (or even one drive for that matter).  I don't want to create profile, add a picture...and I don't want my stuff 'in the cloud!'  My MS online accounts are irrelevant to my using my desktop PC.  I don't want to have to be or even expected to be connected to the internet for my desktop to function. 

I have a local install of Office 2016 Pro  (just like a number of other folks who posted here last month.)  I did that because when the fine print popup started this was the place where it was being discussed.  So to be clear, this impacts local installs of Office. 

It almost looks like MS is laying the ground work to force users to 365 - and I am not interested.  (The paranoid in me can't help but wonder if MS cooperating with the feds to get data into the cloud to make illegal spying on everyone a bit easier.) 

So  I've downloaded LibreOffice 6 so I can test my more complex spreadsheets, it been 6 years or so since I last tried it - at that time there enough quirks in calc (formulas with functions) that it was a no go...  I really resent having to spend my time to recover from MS screwups.