When was it not? Telemetry - the act of collecting logs/"metrics" and reporting them back to a remote (tele) station - how could this not be considered telemetry?
Actually the name for it previously was spyware or the act of spying. The term telemetry is/was more neutral, but it also has a bad reputation by now (euphemism treadmill).
Used to be that transmitting data about what the user's doing without asking for permission was "spyware" automatically—that it was happening behind your back was already a sign of bad faith.
The opt-in thing is fine, but some of us are still stuck, I guess, on older standards for software ethics, and find it entirely unacceptable and alarming that opt-out was ever proposed in the first place, about as bad as if they'd proposed adding an opt-out bitcoin miner to it to help fund the project—it's disturbing they'd consider that OK to even propose.
Edit: have been doing software since the mid-nineties. You can downvote all you want, but this is a more recent usage.