I think they dropped the attempt at adding telemetry. So, yes, it was misjudged (poorly thought out in the first place and poorly communicated) but in the end amounted to nothing.
For example, if you have telemetry but you allow users not to participate (whether opt in or opt out) then it skews the telemetry anyway.
What (reportedly) remains is: if the application craps out, it will ask whether to send an error report and show you what it would send if you allowed it to do so (which you can allow or disallow on a one-time basis or on an ongoing basis via a “remember this decision” checkbox on the send/don’t send dialog box). And the error reports are self-hosted by the project rather than using an untrusted third party (like Google), as originally proposed.
It looks to me that you could in theory also edit the report before sending (to censor out something) if you wanted to.
This gives the user the choice. Don’t send the error report - and at best work around the problem, or live with it, or hope that someone else has the same problem and does allow the error report to be sent. Or send the error report in the hope that someone on the project will fix the error.
And any given distro can choose whether or not to include that error reporting code at all.
I have Audacity installed but I only infrequently use it and I don’t know how to make it crash reproducibly, so I can’t verify the above statements about error reporting. Well, obviously I could verify by looking at the source code but I don’t want to spend that time.