Would you feel more comfortable reading a sensationalist post about an evil corporation devouring a great free software project? Would you trade factually correct information for whatever fits your view of the world?

This is the part that annoys me:

"Yes, you can rebuild Audacity with all networking features disabled. You don’t even need to use any build configure switches for that. On the contrary, you need to enable networking if you specifically want that in your custom build. If you rely on the official build for Windows or macOS, you have to opt out of networking features."

The average user will never build the software. The natural pattern should be to prompt the user on installation to enable automated bug reporting. Simple as that.

You do realize that "enabled" crash reporting means "when a crash happens, ask the user if they want to upload the crash report"?

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/836

The initial plan was to do just that: provide a startup dialog to query user for enabling or disabling networking features. It hasn't yet materialized in 3.0.3 as seen in RC2 on Linux, I'm not sure if this will arrive in later releases but I will ask them when opportunity presents itself.

Also, Linux distributions will most likely ship Audacity without networking features. So that part of the community will be unaffected at all.

Wait, you didn't check the source code?