I would not be at all surprised if there was a high correlation between "People who turned off Javascript" and "People who declined to provide telemetry", so there could be some selection bias in those results.
NoScript is a much better option all around. I know I've been using it since forever.
When I got my last company laptop without all these things set, I was surprised how painful it was to try and download anything without a proper adblocker and noscript. I don't know how people do it.
This is not a conspiracy, just making browser hard to break for people who check boxes and forget about these. For those, browser is broken!
Those who know what disabling JavaScript actually does still have a way to disable! Where does all the privacy talk come in between?