Tenacity is distinct in more fundamental ways that just not being copyright infringement (for one, it uses a different GUI toolkit and is way slower and buggier), so its appeal at this point isn't closely related to whether people like Muse or not.

It's complete BS. Audacity never stopped being open source and currently has update checking and crash reporting - it does not have any telemetry.

I recently needed to do some sound editing, and I had a dreadful experience with Tenacity. Running on PopOS, I encountered many crashes doing simple manipulations. Even trying to scroll while playing audio ostensibly resulted in a crash. Small favor, the restore-unsaved-work functionality did save me several times.

Eventually, I held my nose and ran Audacity in a VM, and not a single crash.

FWIW it was never an issue for Linux distribution packages of Audacity. It was behind a compile-time flag so distro build scripts could have been changed to disable the telemetry. In fact the flag was disabled by default, so distro build scripts didn't even need to change and would've continued producing telemetry-free binaries.

Only binaries from Audacity themselves had the telemetry, which (as usual) is why you should never use upstream binaries.

seems like its because they tried to add basic telemetry?