It's sort of hilarious to compare "talking to people" with analytics. I'm not defending Github here, but you can't possibly think that "talking to 1M customers" is viable.
This is just nonsense tbh. Surveys and customer outreach solve completely different problems from analytics.
Survey data is still real data that can be used for "analytics".
Some people also hate telemetry. It feels invasive. I have a guess about what direction the percentage of consumers who hate telemetry is moving toward.