Probably related to[0]. To anybody complaining that this should be opt-in: opt-in telemetry doesn't work. The reason for this is that most people don't care, but they don't care either way. They don't disable it when prompted, nor would they enable it manually. The idea of telemetry is being able to prioritize the work that will be most widely useful. For this you need a good and balanced sample of your users. You do…
It does sort of hinge on the highly suspect assumption that usefulness is correlated with use. An obvious counter-example to this is something like a fire-extinguisher, which will in the ideal case just sit on a wall until it's use-by date passes and then it's discarded having never been used; or on the flip side, an incredibly byzantine workflow that could be reduced to something much simpler will appear important and useful.
Even without these edge cases, interpreting statistics is really hard. Like people with PhDs who have studied these things for years still get them wrong all the time.
What ends up happening more often than not is it's used as a tool to quiet the critics when pushing through unpopular changes.