alt Hacker NewsI’d just assume good intent here. Feature flags, telemetry, and fast rollouts / rollbacks are standard practice in software. Have a look at chrome://flags perhaps.
I fully believe GP that there was zero intent to gate this behind collecting telemetry. Sounds like a little tech debt and a little oversight, and the simplest explanation is that it is.
You can have flags work in a pull fashion, though. At boot, and every 5 minutes, query an endpoint which returns flag values. You don't need the client to send any information about what the user is doing.