God I hate that System user. Somehow, back when I used Windows, it granted System the ownership of a bunch of folders in my D: that even as an admin I couldn't delete-- I think because of Microsoft store?

It wasn't until I started playing with Linux (Manjaro at the time) that I was able to clean it up. Something like 600gb of game files, lol.

You can connect into the system as system and then do all the horrible things. It's not well publicized because they don't want you breaking stuff.

You certainly can't delete them all but its possible to rename everything and delete them that way but If I recall windows would likely generate new versions very quickly after some very weird error messages and maybe a restart.

They're not hardcoded, you can take ownership of the files with commands (takeown and icacls). As some other user already mentioned, there are ways to start a command prompt as the SYSTEM user. Windows will still not let you delete them however, because most of them are being used by processes.

The system user is part of Dos like root is part of Unix. I think what you're referring to is how the whole OS runs in a virtualization layer because Microsoft doesn't trust its own kernel. This also disallows a lot of folders from being deleted or modified. I'm not sure if system32 is included.