I wonder why users would have such a bias, other than their experience over the last 25 years.
I’m a developer. I side with the users on this.

It’s the ideal solution morally-wise, but it still samples out a ton of users precisely because people are used to the idea of telemetry = bad

And that's a good thing. Because that is the decision by the user. The freedom of choosing in opt in fashion is much more important than collecting some individual data for a specific use case of a specific company. Opt in is not just ideal solution morally-wise, its the best solution we have in general and every company should strife this solution. Plus the data should be presented before sending, so there is no ambiguity. Steam, a closed source program, does that in the best possible way.