alt Hacker NewsCruft can be removed yes but the telemetry is literally how they measure quality. Their metrics of whether it’s good or not is the status of telemetry on a given device set and figuring out root cause. So they can’t easily roll back the telemetry without a massive rethink in their quality strategy
Along with this, which is how nearly every major piece of software works today, removing telemetry likely wouldn't have a measurable impact on performance or memory usage. Those aren't heavy subsystems.