Hi there,
I'm the original Win9 creator (the one that inspired this video). I work at a retirement home and in my spare time I run EastCoast.Hosting.
The original intent for Windows 9 was to keep the user experience the same as windows 7, think elderly/stubborn people, etc. I also wanted to remove as much bloat as possible, this is my one gripe about Win 8 and up. I'm still mad that friggin candy crush is pre-installed on 10 Enterprise. What is M$ thinking?!
I've made a custom 10 osimage (http://imgur.com/a/IdDK1), but its kinda designed for work. I cant really share that one. It doesn't have a straight up win7 theme, but its debloated and many of the metro modern crap is removed in favor of windows 7 like menus (such as replacing the personalization panel, and the older volume control, etc). Also I've found that 10's build upgrades nuke the tweaks, so I've set up a WSUS server that allows everything thru except the build upgrades.
The intent for both of these isn't performance, but ease of use and familiarity (and low memory usage because old people have old computers).
Not really... I don't really track what changes I make to the system - so I might accidentally leave something in there that gives away my work or something that can allow M$ to hunt me down and sue.
I found that server 2016 is a nice start for a clean win10. No junk and more control of updates.
All you'd need to do after install is run an anti spying tool, find a start replacement, maybe some icon tweaks, set up oldnewexplorer and you basically got the above screenshot.
For more stuff, you can follow various guides online on how to restore the personalization panel, taskmgr, volume control, right click menu, etc.
Then lots of Group policy tweaks to disable annoyances.
