Exactly. They're not protections. They're strategies to make it harder for non-super-users to change their default browser.
As technical people, it's easy to underestimate just how well these tactics that introduce friction work at making "regular" folks shurg and say "meh, okay, whatever -- sure, I'll use Edge" just because they don't want to repeatedly have to figure out how to change their default browser.
It's one thing to push "protections" on your users because you think you know better and they can't navigate their way around their devices without ruining them. That's the Apple way.
But what Microsoft has done here is push their own product in the name of protection. That's much more malicious. To argue whether it is a protection because they call it one is semantics.
Get back to us with that when it's less of an utterly transparent lie. When, for instance, switching your default handler for .txt files leads you through three dialogs that ever more insistently extol the virtues of MS Notepad for this purpose.
