People have deserted whole projects over telemetry. Audacity comes to mind. Telemetry is obviously not popular with people who are already sacrificing so much over privacy.
There's no point in trying to sway linux users in favor of telemetry, because most of us already know it's only a privacy risk and doesn't do much. Does Gnome really listen to its users feedback anyway? If yes, why is there still no typeahead in Nautilus despite constant user feedback? Why is there still no way to have a dash to dock without extensions?
Opt-out is not a solution because you're asking people to scrub every package and figure out how to opt out. It's time consuming and must be done with every fresh install.
A good example of the uselessness of telemetry is Firefox. They keep removing features used by advanced users in Firefox because Mozilla thinks those features aren't used a lot. Turns out, most advanced users of firefox don't enable telemetry because they seek privacy from their browser.
