I’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.
Well yes but as soon as you log this on the backend, you have telemetry, no?