What did happen to Audacity? I remember there was some controversy about them years back, but are they good now?

In May 2021, after the project was acquired by Muse Group,[53] there was a draft proposal to add opt-in telemetry to the code to record application usage. Some users responded negatively, with accusations of turning Audacity into spyware.[54] The company reversed course, falling back to error/crash reporting and optional update checking instead. [55] Another controversy in July 2021[56] resulted from a change to the privacy policy which said that although personal data was stored on servers in the European Economic Area, the program would "occasionally [be] required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA".[57] That July, the Audacity team apologized for the changes to the privacy policy and removed mention of the data storage provision which was added "out of an abundance of caution."[56]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacity_(audio_editor)

It's still one of the first things I install

Audacity was probably, unknowingly, the first GPL program I directly used as a kid (as in, not a library or software on a server.) We had it on school computers and made silly voice recordings.

It was either that or Tux paint where we made silly drawings :)

I spent two (recent) years editing on Audacity before moving to a DAW.

Audacity still gets used often still because it's just so much easier for tiny/terrible splice jobs