The goal of telemetry is to make data driven decisions about features and use cases that can make the most difference to our users.
One way we could collect data is to conduct surveys but traditionally, these had very low participation and are also biased towards users that are already active in our community. Having telemetry allows us to collect feedback from our larger user base and avoids this bias.
Opt-in telemetry, at best, gives us a narrow and biased set of users. At this point, we are back to make decisions based on limited data. Opt-out telemetry that is limited in scope is the tradeoff we made in terms of preserving user privacy while still gathering meaningful data that can help improve the product.
In terms of intent, we are very clear about what data we are collecting and why we are collecting it in our telemetry docs:
https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/84df871b-9442-42fd-b4c3-0024e35b5f3c.html
You also don't have to take our word for it - you can inspect the source code to see where telemetry is being collected:
https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron/commit/0a08e7b5e8189f958ecccb0559807659d933e4ea