Well, I’m convinced that the Windows SDK install “Step 2” is not actually necessary for a functional driver dev environment. Installing just VS2022 (with the necessary additional “Individual Components” listed below) with the Win11 SDK installed as part of VS2022, along with the WDK, is sufficient to build all of the WDK samples aside from 4 of them which fail due to known issues with their .idx files. The VS2022 install does need these four “Individual Components” in order to avoid a bunch of missing ATL library build errors:
MSVC v143 - VS 2022 C++ ARM64/ARM64EC Spectre-mitigated libs (Latest)
MSVC v143 - VS 2022 C++ x64/x86 Spectre-mitigated libs (Latest)
C++ ATL for latest v143 build tools with Spectre Mitigations (ARM64/ARM64EC)
C++ ATL for latest v143 build tools with Spectre Mitigations (x86 & x64)