There’s some serious irony in posting these today of all times but I appreciate the writeup nonetheless.

I’m going to assume you’re looking for a solution in a personal context, not organizational so I won’t suggest local group policy.

Instead, I’d recommend removing the msstore source from “Winget”. The Microsoft Store uses this source to push updated for installed third party applications. It may not solve the issue entirely, but I find that as Microsoft expands the use of winget as a package manager for Windows (especially Windows 11), the store itself seems to use it for update provisioning.