Gathering telemetry data is asking the users, and happens to be the most cost effective way to do so. Forum discussions do not scale and only satisfy the needs of the loudocracy, and polls are going to suffer from a similar participation bias.
Disabling telemetry by default ended up harming the users of those distributions by making their usage of ALSA invisible. Again, that choice by the distro maintainers isn't something that Mozilla had any control over. Voluntarily withholding telemetry data is similar to abstaining from an election. You dont get to complain about who got elected if you didn't vote, likewise you dont get to complain about lack of support for your use cases if you don't allow upstream projects to know that you have them.