There’ a disturbing amount of conspiracies racing around the internet but there’s almost always a common reaction to challenging them, and it’s the equivalent of a child plugging their ears and screaming.
Here’s a story of my encounter many years ago with one of those.

While the following may seem odd, it was a “thing” back in the 90s and early 2000’s.
New PCs bought in stores almost always came with recovery discs. Usually a combo of the OS disc, driver disc, and various apps on their own discs.
Over time they were combined into a single disc containing an image of a fully loaded OS, then a DVD, finally topping out across 2 or more DVDs (5 was not uncommon).

Towards the late 2000’s-early 2010’s vendors stopped shipping PCs with discs and provided a builtin recovery system on the PC hard drive. Some did this earlier, but not a lot. Storage was a premium back then.
While the reasons were varied it most likely came down to costs of discs, but that’s pure conjecture on my part.

One interesting choice was that the recovery partition was typically exposed to users, and was frequently used as storage, usually as a “backup” drive, or just deleted altogether.
This more often than not compromised the backup partition, so users were almost always encouraged on first boot up to create recovery discs.
For some unknown reason (I heard rumors of Windows licensing) they usually only got 1 chance, and that the recovery system would self destruct or purge the recovery partition once done, dumb, I know.

Some vendors chose to hide the recovery partition and just not give it a letter, simple and easy to do.

Okay, now that all that’s been laid out, here’s the interaction.

While working in retail I was confronted by a gentlemen looking at the PCs.
I could tell based on his demeanor he had no expectation of buying a PC and was just looking for a confrontation hoping to overwhelm some helpless salesperson.
Instead he got me.

He asked where the recovery partition was and I briefly explained everything above, leaving out the history part because this is just how things were at the time.
Well he didn’t like that and went into a tirade saying this was a conspiracy to get people to buy a set of recovery discs from the vendor (usually not too expensive, $10-$25), and that they don’t give you the ability to make yours because the recovery partition isn’t there.

I calmly explained users are free to make at least 1 set on their own for a fraction of cost of ordering discs and that the partition is hidden to keep it intact.
I even offered to take the PC out of demo mode (stops users from messing with settings) and show him all of this.

Typical of people who want to reject the reality in front of them for fear of being wrong with no evidence, he said I was lying and stormed off without giving me a chance to start.

This one has always stuck around with me all these years because I had my fair share of other conspiracies like the AV companies are the ones behind viruses and such, but I couldn’t disprove them, nor could they prove it when I asked for any evidence and usually we came to an understanding.

It was the fact this dude left his home, drove out to the store, and thought they’d win some massive victory by cornering and overwhelming some entry-level worker in a retail store.
A very sad existence.