Your perspective depends a lot on where you're looking from. Small projects have no need for opt-out ("spying") telemetry. Explicitly reported bugs and telemetr

Your perspective depends a lot on where you're looking from. Small projects have no need for opt-out ("spying") telemetry. Explicitly reported bugs and telemetry from self-selected users will provide more than enough stuff to work on, and there really isn't that large a space for bugs to hide in anyway. If you have 100 million users, depending in the bias inherent in opt-in reporting is deadly. You need the statistical correlations for a lot of things to be tractable. You can't afford to staff your development organization as a percentage of your user base, not if you have any competition at all. You'll have to get comfortable with some things that feel like software malpractice at smaller scales - such as accepting that bad RAM really is a significant source of problems when you have millions of users, and you'd better get a feel for what the resulting problems look like.