showing the wi fi password how to stop or get rid of that NOW

Do you have either Windows Hello Face (camera), Fingerprint or PIN, or at least a username and password for logging into your notebook?

If so, then that's the security for anything contained or accessible via that device, just like with any operating system, so having the Wi-Fi password available is simply a convenience feature that allows you to quickly access this to add either your own or other's people's devices to your home network without having to either find this on paper somewhere or possibly even physically reset the network device to change it.

All operating systems have similar features ax these articles indicate:

Connect to a Wi-Fi network in Windows - Microsoft Support

How to See Wi-Fi Passwords on Android

Find your saved Wi-Fi passwords on iPhone or iPad - Apple Support

If your home is being burglarized and your device(s) aren't properly protected using login security, then that's your true problem and badly needs to be fixed. Anyone can reset your router or other network device if they have physical access, so that isn't truly an issue anyway, since you can easily change that network password to something else if you feel it may have been compromised, it's far more difficult to recover from the potential loss of data or other issues that result once your personal device(s) have been breached or stolen.

Focus on the true problems and try to fix those instead, you're viewing a relatively minimal risk as higher than the truly high risk of not properly protecting your devices either physically or via appropriate authentication security in the first place.

Rob

This is part of the WPA2 and WPA3 spec. The device owner can access the Wi-Fi password. It has nothing to do with Windows or Microsoft. It's the same on Android and other OSs. To avoid this, if it's your network, I believe the only solution is to run a RADIUS server (an easy addition to good routers, certainly available in OpenWrt) and use EAP/TLS. This provides an encrypted key to the device rather than using a password.

Note that I agree that passwords should not be exposable. At the very least, there should be an option to prevent exposure, but that's not the way the Wi-Fi people created the WPA security model. I think their philosophy is that the device owner should have access to this. It's a very Linux-like perspective, where much of their security is stored in plain text, with only certain passwords being stored in hashed (unrecoverable) formats.

This is not unique to Windows. This is the same on any Android device and I believe on Mac OS and Linux too. WPA2 and WPA3 passwords are exposable by the person who controls the OS. This can be blocked to non-admin accounts on Windows, but the admin user can always get at the password.

I agree that this is a bad policy (and have never heard an explanation that won me over on the logic behind this), but it's nothing to do with Microsoft. It's how Wi-Fi security works, where the password is not like an OS password that is stored in a hashed and inaccessible form. Wi-Fi passwords are visible to the owner of the device by design.

The only solution I know of is to set up a RADIUS server and use its encrypted per-device authentication model (note that RADIUS can also provide a per-device sign-in and password, which can still be exposed like WPA passwords, so don't use that one).

This is nothing new in Windows 11, all previous versions of Windows allowed you to see the WiFi password, it is not a new security risk in Windows 11, in all versions of Windows, you can perform these steps.

Click your Start Button and just type control

From the resulting menu, open the old Control Panel and at the top, set View to icons

Open Network and Sharing Center and at the top, click the active WiFi connection.

Select the Wireless Properties button, then on the next dialog, select the Security tab and click 'Show Characters'.