I just went into the settings for the widgets, turned off the "Start" or "News" experience or whatever it is and it's never come back. Just using the toggle it offers in settings. While I was at it I went into the taskbar settings and just turned off the widgets altogether, never came back. I wonder if sometimes we just assume the worst and resort first to "hack" ways to disable some of these things and when a new update comes along from your company or whoever, it gets re-enabled. Instead of just using the built-in functionality for turning things off.