No. The official statement from Brian was “I received a couple of personal e-mails from some credible people who stated that their data belonged to them, so we (I) decided to make it opt-in” (paraphrased).
I spent days in that thread. That uproar was “a bunch of noisy minority which doesn’t worth listening” for them.
It's good to know that's what it looks like. I can tell you that the shouting did not really influence the decision. Long-time Go contributors and supporters commenting quietly or emailing me privately had far greater influence.
So as a person who just started programming Go and made some good technical comments didn't matter at all. Only people with clout has mattered, and the voice had to come from the team itself. Otherwise we the users' influence is "fuck all" (sorry, my blood boils every time I read this comment from Russ).
I mean yeah, I too would probably prefer to read a few well-reasoned arguments over email than to wade through hundreds of hateful, vitriolic, accusatory comments from randos in a GitHub thread. Being an open-source maintainer is hard.
Or, you know, do the right thing from the start considering that forced telemetry you have to opt-out of is universally reviled and every project that includes it suffers from literally the same issues.
Google is boneheaded and hostile to open web at this point, explicitly.