No data on this but instinctively it seems, given alternatives, most people abandon some buggy software rather than patiently reporting problems and waiting for it to get better.

In production, agreed. In beta, I’ll accept it. I feel that the term beta gets abused a lot, but in what I believe is it’s proper meaning, there are a lot of inherent factors both parties are agreeing to; increased risk of error and data loss, and debugging flags that generate more data for the singular purpose of improving the product. That’s exactly what should be in the privacy policy and explicitly stated upon install. Anything short of that puts me firmly in the hell-no category with you.

I'm with you on not sending data, but have you ever read user reports? IF you get any (most won't report) they likely won't have enough information to reproduce or fix.

Automated Error reporting does has it uses.