Seems to have only picked up in the last decade or so. Before that it wasn't really practical, and everything seemed to work fine without it.

When I was a kid, computers weren't connected to the internet. The first time I had a connection it was at 33.6 kbit/s (at 25 cents per minute).

Can you imagine if I had had all these 'modern' programs on my computer that would suddenly try to talk over that tiny straw of a connection? It'd be unusable!

There are still a lot of reasons why you would like to maybe hope that a computer doesn't try to randomly talk to everyone and everything on the intertubes on a whim.

For instance: said computer might be acting as a firewall, or it's being used for SCADA, needs to comply with corporate or government security policy, or is otherwise supposed to be something-gapped.

I guess for regular consumer technology that hope has long fled. You'd think that floss software could automatically be trusted to be quiet-by-default, but I guess that time is now past as well.

Possibly software that is quiet-by-default needs to start explicitly noting that it is so; so that if you have a particular task that really needs a quiet-by-default machine, you can draw from that subset.

You are right that audacity probably doesn't need to be in the quiet-by-default category. But ...eh... somehow this feels like a retreat.

It's only common in certain bubbles. Someone who primarily uses FOSS could easily say this. Someone who prefers software created in the era before online telemetry was widespread could also say this.