can a hotmail account with no recovery info ever be recovered

Before the form, check every device you own for one that's still signed in. The Outlook app on an old phone, an Xbox, a Windows PC that logs in with that account. If any of them is still in, you can add a recovery email from there and skip the form entirely. For the subject lines question, ask a couple of people you emailed recently to read you the exact subjects. Guessed ones don't count for much, exact ones do. Also you can only submit the form a couple of times a day, so make each try count.

Not hopeless, but your only route is Microsoft's account recovery form, since there's no phone or email for them to send a code to. The form asks for a contact email (any working one, it's just where they reply) and then quizzes you: old passwords you remember, names on your birth date, subject lines of recent emails, addresses you've emailed. The more you fill in the better your odds, so guess rather than leave blanks. Two things that help a lot. Fill it in on a PC and network you've used that account from before, because they weigh the location. And if it gets rejected, you can submit it again, so go back through your old stuff for more details and retry. One caveat: if the account had no sign-ins at all for a couple of years, Microsoft may have closed it for inactivity, and then there's nothing to recover.