I don't think Microsoft cares since they shouldn't be making a lot of money from retail keys anyway. A majority of users get an activation key when they purchase their computer. And businesses use volume licensing. A small minority of people who pirate an activation key is not a lot of money lost in the big picture.
Also with the amount of telemetry going on in Win 11, the data they collect more than makes up for the slight loss in revenue.
It's not activated, if you need to activate it look up Microsoft Activation Scripts, should be a GitHub link
Edit: to properly answer your question, yes it should be clean and uncracked if you download through Rufus.
I've always used Rufus to download Windows ISOs. It should let you download the latest major Win 11 release. I just used it last week in fact to make a quick bootable USB at work to reimage a device with 11 on it.
Sounds like the performance issues have probably been ironed out then.
Good to hear.
TBF it was during the first few months of release. I want to believe that it was just early release related bugs.
I remember reading this. I found that hilarious