I'm fairly certain that a lot (if not most) regular tracking can be avoided today. Sure, you can never know for certain what exactly you are leaking and what not and total anonymity is pretty much impossible. But I dare say, most tracking is probably low-effort and can be circumvented (especially if you are technically inclined). So your picture of the world may be your reality but certainly not everyone's.

But apart from that, even if the world was really on fire in terms of privacy, it would still not be an excuse to shrug everything off and "give up already". You wouldn't sign off your rights and shut up just because everyone else does, right?

I agree, harassing developers for including telemetry in their programs is absolutely disgusting and not the right way to push privacy. And usually the best response to terms you don't like is to just not agree to them and not use the app.

But in this case, I think it's a bit far-fetched: The dotnet SDK (for instance) is not overly complex (as in: the CLI; crash reports are a different topic), has a nice public GitHub repo and is only used by developers who, if they don't like something, probably know how to file an issue on said GitHub repo. So why does it need telemetry? I don't know what's going on in the dotnet team and maybe there's a good reason behind this choice but from my POV it just seems like it's unnecessarily shutting people who disagree with it out of .NET. And I think this is kind of an injustice to .NET as well (since - and I can not stress this enough - it is really good!)

Alright, </rant>. I'm not angry but "popular apps" (let's just call it that) have largely become a minefield for me, so I just avoid most of them. It's kinda sad that developer tooling is now also shifting in that direction.

The norm isn't to collect data when it comes to development tools. In fact, Microsoft is very unique here. As I said in another comment, they're the only SDK in widespread use that has telemetry that deeply ingrained.