What I want is very simple: I want software that doesn't send anything to the Internet without some explicit intent first. All of that work to try to make this feature plausibly private is cool engineering work, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with implementing a feature like this, but it should absolutely be opt-in.

Trust in software will continue to erode until software stops treating end users and their data and resources (e.g. network connections) as the vendor's own playground. Local on-device data shouldn't be leaking out of radio interfaces unexpectedly, period. There should be a user intent tied to any feature where local data is sent out to the network.

So why didn't Apple just simply ask for user permission to enable this feature? My cynical opinion is because Apple knows some portion of users would instantly disallow this if prompted, but they feel they know better than those users. I don't like this attitude, and I suspect it is the same reason why there is an increasing discontent growing towards opt-out telemetry, too.