Why are so many people stepping forward to defend Muse? They seem to take Muse at face value and defend collecting end-user information in general.
"Yes, you can rebuild Audacity with all networking features disabled. You don’t even need to use any build configure switches for that. On the contrary, you need to enable networking if you specifically want that in your custom build. If you rely on the official build for Windows or macOS, you have to opt out of networking features."
The average user will never build the software. The natural pattern should be to prompt the user on installation to enable automated bug reporting. Simple as that.
Also, Linux distributions will most likely ship Audacity without networking features. So that part of the community will be unaffected at all.