Canonical is not the bar we should be striving to reach. Ubuntu has lost substantial market share over the years due due to various changes including their anti-privacy policies.
This is a matter of perspective. I would consider collecting any type of application usage detail highly intrusive. From your perspective, this may not seem intrusive.
Until someone makes a mistake and accidentally creates a way to correlate/track that data. This is not some radical improbable idea. There have been plenty of high-profile examples of data from various organizations being leaked and/or used in ways that wasn’t intended.
Here is the core problem in my opinion. Linux has a higher percentage of privacy-centric users than other operating systems because many people come to Linux specifically for that reason. None of us know exactly what that percentage is. It is not 80+% as some people have implied but it also isn’t some insignificant minority as other have implied. I would guess that on a distro like Fedora it is probably somewhere in the 25-40% of users range.
That portion of the Fedora community will be completely alienated by opt-out metrics. Even if it doesn’t make sense to you personally that this would be the case, it is clear from the comments here and elsewhere that this portion of the community feels strongly about it.
Ultimately, Fedora has a decision to make. Is collecting this data via an opt-out mechanism valuable enough to warrant isolating and alienating that portion of the community?