I'm hostile towards both on-line and meatspace telemetry alike. It's just it's much harder to opt out from the latter. When a store I frequent decides to be total assholes and install customer-tracking cameras, I can't even tell (and unfortunately, there's no legal requirement to inform about it; I hope it'll change in the future). And even if I could, like most people, I'm rather price-sensitive when bulk shopping. On-line, I can at least try to defeat most telemetry with content blockers and network filters.
> Of course you should have the right to have that data deleted, but that's different from saying it should never be collected at all.
Anything that GDPR forces to be opt-in (like this telemetry here) is essentially data that shouldn't be collected in the first place.
> Also, given that nearly all websites are using something like Google Analytics or similar (or several of these at once), the reaction and vitriol here just seems weirdly disproportionate.
There were couple compounding issues here, not the least of which was them wanting to deploy telemetry on self-hosted instances. On Gitlab.com, they can deploy analytics scripts to their heart's content; that's just being disrespectful. But self-hosting is something one does in big part to control the data flow, and pushing telemetry onto that kind of defeats the point (it's a real compliance issue for a lot of companies).
As others have said, just because many other people do something, doesn't mean it's good and you should do it too.