The devs' justification was that if it was opt-in, most people wouldn't do it. They thought it better to turn it on and force users to go manually disable it.

The devs' justification was that if it was opt-in, most people wouldn't do it. They thought it better to turn it on and force users to go manually disable it. I disagreed in the GitHub issue about this. Debian's Popcorn (package popularity analytics) is opt-in - a choice on install that defaults to "off". That would be the perfect solution. Ultimately those who agreed with me were told that the decision was made and there would be no further discussion - the issue was closed and locked.