This seems universally hated. I am usually pretty privacy concious and do a lot of stuff that I don't want to be seen by the authorities / competitors / my family / whoever depending on context. But honestly I don't really understand the issue with telemetry. What is your concrete worry, or your threat model?

A) I can imagine somebody you know works at Google, and tries to stalk you. But they'd need to know your IP address, and I assume Google has protections in place against accessing consumer data, and it would leave an audit trail. And in the end, they would only be able to see when you edit audio files and whether you use the toolbar or keyboard shortcuts.

B) Or maybe they feed that data into a super scary tracking algorithm and use it to better target ads? But I don't know how that would even work, as they would have to understand what Audacity's tracking categories mean.

I know it is a controversal opinion, but I think telemetry is usually a net win. Especially if you want to improve the UX of your open source app, you need actual usage data. And unfortunately, opt-in doesn't work, because you get skewed data. Why would anybody opt in? There's no benefit to me to take part, but there is benefit to all if everybody takes part.