Go create a new machine. Even a VM.
Indeed - use VMWARE routinely for this, and actually the right way to archive a Cube IDE project (for long term) would be to archive such a VM. You could even distribute the kit to other devs that way - a setup which is "guaranteed" to run out of the box (windoze copyright is one issue though, but the recipient could buy a win7-64 on Ebay and replace the product code from that).
Re MX, I don't use it and don't care for it. Yes it may well be a standalone C++ module. I know someone who uses it to generate code fragments for some peripheral, takes them to bits, and dumps the rest. It saves time... much faster than reading the RM.
Most of the time I use a text editor which has few features
Sure; me too. But the average coder who is not an expert benefits from this kind of integration. Especially if this has to be documented for someone else
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I spent years on Brief (editor), Polymake, etc, running a Japanese £10,000 Z180 ICE for breakpoints... times have moved on and expectations have moved on. Also Cube is free, which addresses
major issues (cost, project archiving, etc).
Whether it is worth installing all of that by default is a matter of opinion
ST Cube IDE does not offer a choice.
About that irritating issue with Cube IDE opening spurious files from you Debug, there are now two threads running on the ST forum. One guy described a process for fixing it but it isn't trivial. I also got asked by one ST employee for some logfile but he failed to tell me where I might find it, and never came back
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It is obvious what it is: Cube opens the C source for whichever point in the binary the CPU was running when it was halted. Normally this is not anywhere relevant; it is random. It tends to be waiting on some mutex, or in the RTOS Idle task (as you would expect). That file opening needs to be made conditional on the context in which the CPU halted. If it is not due to a breakpoint, do not open the file.