And you're just falling into their trick. Just check how this works. And how easy it is to forget to do this on every environment you're deploying to, or for every other developer in your team.
What is the trick? They provide an easy way to disable telemetry and multiple ways to do it. It's up to your team to follow your organizations processes. If you don't want telemetry enabled, tell them to disable it and have checks in place to make sure it's disabled.
There's an easy way to do this, which is having a config setting. They don't want to put it easy, and provide all these more convoluted ways, because what you describe is an "ideal" which doesn't reflect real life at most workplaces. That's the whole trick. "It's easy, just put this environment variable and ensure everyone on your team does it on their laptops and ensure every staging and production environment also does it and setup checks and scripts to automate it and alarms and improve your processes... it's just that easy".
Can you explain what's wrong with having a friggin boolean in a config file? Like VSCode does? Like any other non-evil piece of software does?
That's what I mean with being evil. That's what I mean with tricks.
Of course it can be disabled, and it "seems easy". That's the trick.
This is exactly the evil part I'm talking about.