Has it though? What are the red flags? The only thing they've done wrong IMO is using Google Analytics and they changed that pretty much as soon as this whole thing started.

The telemetry has always been opt-in (though they didn't communicate that very well) and their privacy policy is just standard stuff.

I haven't been following it closely, but in another thread on Audacity earlier today there was a threat by the Muse group saying that it was illegal to use their public API to download public domain content and that they would collaborate with China to physically track down developers who posted code that used the API. Or something like that.

Again I haven't followed it. Honestly it looks a bit to me like the playbook you see when a project is sold to a private equity firm.

Audacity is designed as an audio editor rather than a DAW. I'd be surprised if a DAW like Ardour had destructive editing, spectral analysis, or sample-level waveform view. From the UI perspective, I don't know if it has the ability to "open" an audio file and turn it into a single-file project, or if you can disable tempo sand best-based timings altogether (since podcasts and such lack a concept of tempo).