Humans managed to live for most of history without penicillin, or even boiling water, at the cost of most humans dying before making it to adolescence. People managed to have global communications with only steam ships and telegraph, at the cost of slower pace of information dissemination. NASA managed to make it to the moon with less computing power than the cellphone in your pocket, at high resource, monetary, human and time costs. Cars managed to work with more rudimentary design than today's, without any computers, at the cost of lower life-spans, lower efficiency and higher pollution.

You can make many arguments for and against telemetry in developer tools. Not acknowledging that telemetry helps with visibility into how those tools actually work in the wild, which in turn helps lower the incidence of bugs and speed up development, is disingenuous. You can arrive to the conclusion that even inert, opt-in telemetry is not worth it, but don't disregard out of hand the utility of it in helping their development as if it were some crazy idea.