I believe the reality is they need telemetry so they can use it to validate their own decisions. They can produce nice charts and tell each other they're doing a great job and feel good about it, even if users are complaining about it (or just silently accepting it, until some last straw causes them to leave).

If you were to measure my metrics, they'd still look the same as in v7, and they'd tell them nothing about the fact that I think v8 is crap, and that v8 means that one day I might just wake up and say "yeah let's try that bitwarden that HN always talks about".