Please elaborate on your allegations. As I understand it, there was the original telemetry PR, which had a "Don't Send"/"Send" dialog at first startup. (A screenshot of this dialog was not added to the PR until several days after it was first posted, so many were under the impression that it was strictly opt-out.) The "Send" option was more prominent, which many people called a dark pattern, but it was still an explicit choice by the user.
After that, they resolved to only add "Don't Send"/"Send" crash reporting and opt-out update checking, which only sends the OS version, Audacity version, and IP address. (They claim to immediately anonymize the IP address.) The user is notified about the update checking at first startup.
Which part of this do you consider "doing this and gaslighting the community about it"?
So you're saying that opt-out automatic update checking ruined their product by any reasonable definition, and they were entirely aware of this, so by claiming that automatic update checking is useful they were gaslighting their users?
If so, then from what source are we certain that the "army of people telling them 'no'" in the relevant GitHub issues is representative of how their broader user base feels about automatic update checking? And how do we know that they ought to have been similarly certain?
But the creators (someone trying to be "owners" of sowmth5 that is just a name, lol) has the foresight to make it free and open source, so we have Tencity, the original software with a new name.