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Opt-out telemetry is indeed awful, no matter how righteous one feels in the cause to get it.

I'm going to be controversial and disagree with this. If you're being onboarded to an app, and there's a "enable telemetry?" button and it's clear and checked by default, that's not awful. If your data is sufficiently anonymized, that's the only way you're going to get actual user data, otherwise it's skewed to be those that go out of the way to enable it - in other words, not normal users.

No, data collection ought to always be based on informed consent. A default enabled checkbox that can easily be skipped over does not constitute informed consent.

I agree that opt-in telemetry however is useless.

Thus, the only ethical and useful option is forced choice; i.e. present the user with two unselected options where a decision between them must be made.

This is e.g. how Apple designed its usage data option for the Apple TV, AFAIK. Two unselected options, given equal weight and styling etc.

By that logic, it should be fine to have a big obvious "enable telemetry?" button that's disabled by default, right? Because otherwise you're just assuming that people will ignore it and leave things on the default setting, and claiming that it's okay to exploit that to enable telemetry.

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