Comparing Flatpak or Gnome to Apple seems highly irrelevant in the context of this post. But, you do realize that neither Gnome, nor Flatpak is a trillion dollar company, right? Also, since when are Flatpak apps "barely usable"?
As far as I know, that's not the case. Maybe some UEFI implementations by some vendors can extract the UEFI firmware that's embedded in the exe file. But, UEFI doesn't run exe files.
Most distros let you either opt-in or opt-out of it though. It's really not as big of a deal as people make it out to be. Besides, the "general" population switching to Linux doesn't really care about anonymized telemetry.
Discouraging people to not use a certain distro due to its optional and anonymized telemetry, is foolish.
That's a very serious allegation to make without citing any source.
Still collects some user data
Someone has already pointed out, no data is collected unless the user opts in. But, my question is what's wrong with collecting anonyomized telemetry about most used hardware and most used/unused software features? It helps developers make better decisions.
Discovery is shit.