Why it has to include PII by definition? I'd say DNF Counting (https://github.com/fedora-infra/mirrors-countme) should be considered "telemetry", yet it doesn't seem to collect any personal data, at least by what I understand telemetry and personal data to mean.
I'm guessing that you'd either have to be able to argue that DNF Counting isn't telemetry, or that it contains PII, but I don't see how you could do either.
I would argue that users can't inherently trust the average developer anymore. Ideas about telemetry, phoning home, conducting A/B tests and other experiments on users, and fundamentally, making the software do what the developer wants instead of what the user wants, have been thoroughly baked in to many, many developers over the last 20 or so years. This is why actually taking privacy seriously has become a selling point: It stands out because most developers don't.
If you take the next step: “do not use software from vendors you don’t trust,” you are severely limiting the amount of software you can use. Each user gets to decide for himself whether this is a feasible trade off.