We hear you. We agree this was a mistake, and over the ~three years since then we've listened to the community, for example by releasing local processing for Kite.
I was prepared to give Kite another shot but seeing that checkbox just made me lose confidence. Caddy almost got destroyed by this! Please please please reconsider and make telemetry opt-in, you don't have enough goodwill given Kite's history with exfiltration, and the product has access to too much vital information to be playing around with users trust like this.