I'd say there are more people willing to call bullshit on a spokesperson for a large company than to believe them. There are people who are good at calling out bullshit, and people who aren't, but I think that only comes into play if there truly is a mind-numbingly, obviously nefarious goal such as the example you've given; at the end of the day, it comes down to what you want to believe and where you place your trust. You use X as an example, a company in which you clearly have no trust (wise). But, if a company you believed to have a clean track record and whose products you trusted made statements about their product, then you'd be more inclined to take it at face value than to look into it more. Furthermore, just because someone is trying to sell to you doesn't mean they have to lie to you to do it, choosing to believe their pitch should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
And if people see two statements that are that contradictory, yet refuse to research the matter and just believe what they hear?
This is so douchey. Why not just give that money to Wikipedia? Or even a smaller amount? As the largest free information resource in the world, Wikipedia is an invaluable asset for humanity as a whole. Just feels weird to say, "I'll give you money, but do a trick first," to anyone, let alone the holders of a free, worldwide encyclopedia.
Check out OnlyOffice. It's a fork of LibreOffice that's almost an exact clone of MS Office. It's a fantastic program that should be familiar to anyone coming from Windows.
Since you're just using a VM, you should try out some other distros and then pick one to install on your machine. Linux Mint is great for new users just switching from Windows. I personally find the KDE Plasma DE to be the best replacement for the Windows 10 GUI, so I'd recommend you check out Kubuntu or KDE Neon.
I've been using Pop!OS recently, and it's amazing. Everything works out of the box with no need to tweak anything, and I love the workflow features like autotiling and the launcher. The Pop! Shop is also something I'm appreciating more. It's an excellent place for new users to look for software, and the flatpak support really makes it perfect for me. I've been using flatpaks instead of official repositories as much as I can recently, and it's been a long time since anything I have installed has caused me issues.
The problem is it'll have everything except users and advertisers. That second one wouldn't be so bad, but I guarantee Xitter will lean hard into a subscription model when advertising really stops paying; they're already testing it out with paid verification.
I'd say there are more people willing to call bullshit on a spokesperson for a large company than to believe them. There are people who are good at calling out bullshit, and people who aren't, but I think that only comes into play if there truly is a mind-numbingly, obviously nefarious goal such as the example you've given; at the end of the day, it comes down to what you want to believe and where you place your trust. You use X as an example, a company in which you clearly have no trust (wise). But, if a company you believed to have a clean track record and whose products you trusted made statements about their product, then you'd be more inclined to take it at face value than to look into it more. Furthermore, just because someone is trying to sell to you doesn't mean they have to lie to you to do it, choosing to believe their pitch should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
And if people see two statements that are that contradictory, yet refuse to research the matter and just believe what they hear?
Then yeah, they're just gullible.