Listening to people biases the outcome towards those who feel confident speaking up, and have time and energy and ability to do so. Having those circumstances apply is a privilege, and does not implicitly grant those who have that privilege the right to control the outcome.
Telemetry provides unbiased data about the vast majority of users, especially including those not privileged enough to make their needs known (for any one of thousands of reasons) — with the notable exception of various Linux distributions who have decided that they do not wish their users to be represented in the data, and certain power users who simultaneously demand the right not to contribute unbiased data yet seem to feel entitled to have their needs met.
I didn’t know that Firefox disabled ALSA but it doesn’t surprise me at all that it impacted users whose telemetry is disabled for idealistic reasons. Open source is discovering that the economics of free and the burden of long tail support are not compatible goals, and there will be many more pain points in many more open source products along this road. In the past, the squeaky wheel would get the grease; now, sometimes, the car might be converted to a tricycle and the squeaky wheel disposed of as superfluous to the greater good.
Most of the time, I take for granted that this is where the rubber meets the road on their ideals: The distro’s ideals demand that their users not be represented via telemetry, and so their users pay that price in exchange for the ideals they (often unknowingly) signed up for with that distribution. If upstream fails to take them into account as a result, the distro already accepted on behalf of its users that upstream will make decisions that aren’t compatible with their users as a result of disabling telemetry. Idealism is not free of costs.
In my more cynical moments, I wonder if this is because they fear that unbiased data would show that their use cases are in the severe minority (like, 0.0001%), and so feel think there’s a higher chance of having their needs met by withholding telemetry and then banging the outrage drums loudly to make their numbers look larger than life. Game theory suggests it’s a possibility, anyways.