When the market speaks, people who insist opt-out and telemetry auto-update is necessary then insist that the market just doesn't know what's good for it. This is Audacity forking. It could fail, but I don't know that anyone has the kind of allegiance to Audacity as a project (that is recently under new ownership) to not follow the fork. The new ownership didn't buy the users, and if somebody else will take better care of the project why not go with them?

The project lead said he had no say about the telemetry and couldn't turn it down. For me, that makes is a business decision and not a technical one. This is to monetize, not to help me.