When it's couched in how to deliver software updated, it becomes your problem as well. That's a transaction, and they want to charge more for it now. You can decide it's too costly, as you indicate here, but it's not like they're giving nothing in return.

I think it's important to note the goals of those involved. In this case, it's the people that put together a free product for us to use and also supply free timely software updates looking for more information on who is using what so they can do a better job at delivering that free stuff to us.

And in this case, it's not adding tracking where it doesn't exist, it's making it better for the specific cases that are useful to them and that impact users the least (an accounting of software configurations). They already track through IP address, but that's inaccurate to a much larger degree for the information they want (but somewhat less so for the personal information you likely want to protect). Adding an additional system that allows better tracking of the useful information without increasing the personally identifying features of IP based tracking (which still exists) is laudable, in my eyes.

And your need to run an OS on your computer is your problem, not theirs. What do you do if everyone on the sell side of the market uses telemetry? Just stop using computers?