Both of which fall squarely into the sort of analytics that fit the Wikipedia definition of spyware. Why, Balena?

Actually, Wikipedia's definition of spyware makes a point in the intro that this behavior may be present in malware as well as in legitimate software and concludes that because these behaviors are so common, and can have non-harmful uses, providing a precise definition of spyware is a difficult task.

So all the default configured access.log files for all the Apache and Nginx servers out there are spyware? I'm kinda confused by this point because any time your computer makes a TCP connection to another host, that host knows what time it is, and knows what your IP address is.

I think the point is that for an application writing a local file to a local disk that should not be required to run. Even just prompting or asking would be fine.

You make it sound as though they aren't still collecting data and the only things they've ever collected are IP addresses and timestamps. That's not accurate context.