What I mean is, it definitely isn't explicit policy to remove features that phone home; but, it is sometimes still done at the package maintainer's discretion. For things that are unfree all bets are off. (Removing or interfering with such code may be against the license.)
And yes, good point, this was indeed discussed when devbox enabled AI training by default. It somehow seems like there is more than one category of phoning home at play here, since it is obviously tolerated in other cases.