Perhaps this is the case for the majority of Windows 10 installations. Or perhaps you're a lucky — and exceptional — case.
I can only add my anecdotes to your anecdotes, and I have no large scale statistically significant figures to claim my anecdotes are the general case.
But my anecdotes completely disagree with you. Two Windows 10 installations under my care in the past exhibited wild, mind-of-their-own-esque resource usage when they were supposed to be idling. One was a upgraded-from-Windows-7 physical installation (with no malware, I can attest to that) on which explorer.exe would start consuming ~ 60% CPU usage when left idle, another was a virtual installation of fresh Windows 10 without any apps installed on which the host hypervisor reported arbitrary, persistent (upto tens-of-minutes at a time) CPU usage rise.
And the sheer lack of things I could do about it frustrated me. Ultimately, I had to replace the Windows on the physical computer (a friend's laptop) with Kubuntu (thankfully, she liked the new experience), and replaced the virtual machine with Windows 7.
Perhaps this is the case for the majority of Windows 10 installations. Or perhaps you're a lucky — and exceptional — case.
I can only add my anecdotes to your anecdotes, and I have no large scale statistically significant figures to claim my anecdotes are the general case.
But my anecdotes completely disagree with you. Two Windows 10 installations under my care in the past exhibited wild, mind-of-their-own-esque resource usage when they were supposed to be idling. One was a upgraded-from-Windows-7 physical installation (with no malware, I can attest to that) on which explorer.exe would start consuming ~ 60% CPU usage when left idle, another was a virtual installation of fresh Windows 10 without any apps installed on which the host hypervisor reported arbitrary, persistent (upto tens-of-minutes at a time) CPU usage rise.
And the sheer lack of things I could do about it frustrated me. Ultimately, I had to replace the Windows on the physical computer (a friend's laptop) with Kubuntu (thankfully, she liked the new experience), and replaced the virtual machine with Windows 7.