I am not using VS Codium myself (nor VS Code), but if I was using it, then yes, I would trust those people more than MS. For 2 reasons: MS people are working fo

I am not using VS Codium myself (nor VS Code), but if I was using it, then yes, I would trust those people more than MS. For 2 reasons: MS people are working for MS, so at some point in their lives they must have made the decision, that working for MS is acceptable, with all the history MS has. The second reason is, that MS people built in the telemetry in the first place, and for a reason, so they have no incentive to remove or disable it, while others might. A having a reproducible build means, that the hidden telemetry would need to be hidden in the publicly available code. Whereas telemetry in VS Code can be bundled in and no one would ever see that code, except for MS. If I was using it, I might actually, in a motivated night, look at the code and try to grasp the general picture of where goes what. Or perhaps see the diff between VS Code code and VS Codium code, to see, whether they added anything and from where they removed things.