Exactly, for this community is to blame. People mostly are against even minimal and anonymous surveys, telemetry and stuff. So, all they can do is just assuming that people want something or not.
Usually they are talking to active community members, whom, we all know that programmers and technical people.
IMHO, they need a bit more data to decide on
And yet it seems to me only GNOME has this problem, and it has been there since Torvalds still publicly executing everyone in mailing list. XFCE, LXQT, hell, even KDE only has minimal complain about unexpected behavior. It seems to me that in a concerted effort to predict as much user behavior as possible, GNOME created this non existent “average user” that conforms to no one, and created this mess on their own.
Also, we are mostly against nonconsensual, non-explicit, or opt-out type of feedback. As far as I concern, efforts to point out to GNOME devs their faults are many to the point its a meme. It is also, not unrelatedly, a meme that GNOME denies these complaints because “the average users wouldn’t get it”) . I think it should be clear enough by now.
Consent doesnt mean agree in this context tho. And it is debatable whether using is consenting. Do I consent to all the shady shit Microsoft was pulling when I install windows? (Looking at the number of debloaters and their received support from community, that seems like a no)
