>>nsxwol+xo
They did not. Even when they were under the settlement agreement and had to prompt for installation of another default browser at first boot IE was still included in the OS and certain items opened in IE no matter what your default browser was set to. This is the same situation. They are not blocking setting of the browser for general urls but for edge links. Edge links are used by particular software in Windows. For instance the help system always opens pages in Edge.
Whether this is the correct thing for them to do is debatable, but it is not the behavior which got them in trouble during the early browser wars.