> I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users?

Cause the alternative is viewing all of your app as one opaque blob - you don't know exactly how it's being used, which features actually need your attention, especially if you're spread thin. If you're in consulting or something like that and the clients haven't let you configure and/or access analytics (and the same goes for APM and log shipping), it's like flying blind. Couple that with vague bug reports instead of automated session recording and if you need to maintain that, you'll have gray hairs appearing by the age of 30.

Take that disregard of measurement and spread it all across the development culture and you'll get errors in the logs that nobody is seeing and no insights into application performance - with the system working okay at a load X, but falling over at X+1 and you having to spend late evenings trying to refactor it, knowing that it needs to be shipped in less than a week because of client deadlines. Unless the data is something that's heavily regulated and more trouble than it's worth, more data will be better than less data, if you do something meaningful with it.

> Would Git have been significantly better if it had collected telemetry, or would the data not have just been a distraction?

Knowing the most common fuck ups and foot guns might inform better CLI design. Otherwise people saying that it's good have about as much right to do so as saying that it's bad (at least in regards to UX), without knowing the ground level truth about what 90% of the users experience.