I'm very glad you mentioned the homepage spam. It's increasingly difficult (and valuable) to live without information overload these days; Edge's forced "news" spam has pushed me away as well.
What is shocking is the content is so low quality it's appalling it came from a big, respected company as Microsoft. A lot of the posts are often clickbaits, and there are ads carelessly interspersed between the posts all over the page.
I know it makes a lot of money for Microsoft but the fact they chose to keep the quality so low really looks bad.
Biz, gov and mil management relies on MSFT; executives, their attorneys and bankers, respect MSFT for doing what they do ($$). Similar to big retail and worse, gambling, the single user is last in line; used and abused individuals.. nobody expects a lot from the individuals involved, and their opinion matters less. Wolves among sheep, basically.
blocking msn.com via hosts will give you a blank new tab page in Edge, only including an Edge background image, and a search bar leading to your chosen search engine.
You can disable all that from Edge itself, at least on the desktop. When on the new tab page, there's a "Page settings" icon in the top right. If you click on that, there's a bunch of options there regarding what should be present on the page; the bottom-most item is "Content", and if you set it to "Content off", it all goes away.
