Anecdotally, i recently experienced this issue http://superuser.com/a/891516 despite being already opted out of the customer experience improvement program.
This thread is about Win 7 and 8. The first two articles you link to are about Windows 10.
The stack exchange link you mention looks isolated to that user's CPU issue. So isolated, he answers his own question. Comments under the answer from someone else suggests that opting out of CEI solved the issue for that user.
So, as already mentioned, opting out of CEI is all it takes to not worry about MS spying on Win7/8 users. Windows 10 might have issues, but that's another matter.
Have you read http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-w... and https://qht.co/item?id=10037753 ?
Anecdotally, i recently experienced this issue http://superuser.com/a/891516 despite being already opted out of the customer experience improvement program.