It is not overblown. I'm very happy that Microsoft is getting bad press. Hopefully this drives people away from Windows. This is the only way Microsoft "listens". When their revenue takes a hit. The primary issue with Windows 10 is how Microsoft is forcing people to upgrade to it. The secondary issue is with the lack of controls given to users.

I don't want certain Win 7 machines that I own/maintain to ever upgrade to Windows 10. Didn't ask for it. Don't want it. Just go away and let me do my job. Microsoft provides me no official way to disable that horrendous popup. I expect that shit from shady browser toolbars, and bundled crapware, not Microsoft.

Microsoft seems to think the users can't be trusted with options to disable Updates, Telemetry, and other BS services. I absolutely HATE having to ever reboot my windows machine. It is extremely critical for me to have my dev box be rock stable and running 24/7. I frequently used to go months without ever rebooting it. Also, with Win 7 I could just set the Update behavior to "don't call us, we'll call you". With Windows 10 I'm forced to muck around with services and group policy just to get my machine to update and reboot on my schedule, rather than Microsoft's.

As a customer of MS, I despise these methods, as I continue to use their OS, because there simply isn't any other alternative. All I can hope for is people who don't specifically need Windows to switch to other OSs en masse. At this point I could be swayed into thinking that its a good idea to support anti-microsoft efforts even if they are not based in facts (as you point out, nobody has shown exactly what they collect), just to obtain the result that you want.