I disabled all telemetry in Windows and use Glasswire to check what's up, but planning to add RPI with some extra traffic monitoring. Frankly this is untenable. Users shouldn't have to go to such lengths to protect their privacy. Apple and Microsoft need to be held accountable and ordered to delete all personal data harvested to which they cannot provide legitimate reason to have it.

If you don't mind sharing, what did you use to disable telemetry?

Sometimes these companies have a lot of resources to harden other parts of the system though so it'll always be a trade-off.

True, but that line of thinking assumes they will harden those things in favor of the customer/user.

The article suggests that Apple may be exempting its own apps from user-defined network traffic protection measures in order to clamp down on geographical licensing loopholes, or to keep its app traffic out of VPN servers. Either case would be to the benefit of Apple and the detriment of the customer/user IMO.

No, not at all, when compared to Linux.

If you think Linux has no trade-offs in terms of security then you probably overestimate the security work that is invested into a lot of packages.

I know very well how much vetting is done in Debian, and how little is done by most distros.

Are billions of people better served with compromised security not because of some idiot in a suit, but because they installed Linux and don't know what exactly they're doing?

I hope for your safety that you also stopped using any OS written in C.