The maintainers who reply dodge the issue in a way that must be frustrating to the reporter; and makes it seems like they'd probably not accept a PR that modified this behavior. Calling privacy advocates "paranoid" in today's climate is a bit suspect. There's a definite issue here that the Atom team should address - a reasonable user would expect that, after opting out, the app would never phone home, and it does.
Blaming tone is too easy - at this point the Atom team is representing Microsoft, so I'd say the burden is on them to soak up a little snark; especially coming from a user who maybe expects them to behave a bit more like the GitHub of old. Even if they were a small open-source team I would still expect them to directly confront the issue instead of beating around the bush. It's about privacy, and splitting hairs to deny the reporter's reality is a bad look.
Blaming tone is too easy - at this point the Atom team is representing Microsoft, so I'd say the burden is on them to soak up a little snark; especially coming from a user who maybe expects them to behave a bit more like the GitHub of old. Even if they were a small open-source team I would still expect them to directly confront the issue instead of beating around the bush. It's about privacy, and splitting hairs to deny the reporter's reality is a bad look.