The additional data that TikTok tries to gather from the mobile OSs is insignificant compared to what you can get from videos that people take willingly.
Russian soldiers use VK, that doesn't stop OSINT researchers tracking them down on there.
Granted collecting say interest data based on viewing figures would be a precursor (I suppose it's likely that TikTok could figure out if a customer leaned left or right politically). But again that's not what the complaint is about.
It's also hard to ignore that TikTok's responses are at face value reasonable (such as evaluating touch patterns to identify bots... that's obviously something they have to do given the predominance of bots on social media platforms).
A forseeable future is one where Americans are using VPN to access Tik Tok and then we see some government officials clamoring for an American version of the GFW.
Do you think Facebook, Twitter and Reddit should be able to do that?