Why would they change their reasoning with this new enterprise version?

Well, they wouldn't, unfortunately. But I guess if having an enterprise version that doesn't auto-update means that more people are going to get to use it, then that's a Good Thing.

It's true, but you can turn that stuff off.

You want to turn off things under Privacy like "Use a web service to help resolve navigation errors", "Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar", "Automatically report details of possible security incidents to Google", "Use a web service to help resolve spelling errors", and "Automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google." And not login into Chrome.

The problem is that even if you tell all your employees what to disable, some of them will probably not comply. So a truly paranoid IT team might want to make their own fork of Chromium with those features removed.

Are you sure those can't be configured via group policy? Maintaining a fork seems like an absurdly overcomplicated and expensive approach.

Isn't that true for all browsers (and OSes)?

Not for Linux and Firefox afaik.

At the very least, they are modifiable to not do that.