I’m using Fennec which also removes telemetry, but many standard users are not comfortable installing apps that aren’t on Google play.

They mention that the shared codebase means they can add functions back in, so there’s that. To me that reads like a hard fork that they’d have to maintain independently.

The link you shared is the company profile only and doesn’t mention any controversy about telemetry being shared with China.

I’ve been googling for a bit, and there are articles concerned this might happen from 2016 when the takeover was announced, and plenty of discussions on reddit, hacker news, y-combinator, quora and even on the official Opera forum (not deleted or redacted, mind you), but there wasn’t any clear evidence that telemetry is being shared.

While the concern remains valid, I’m also asking myself whether it’s that much worse than Chrome, Brave or Firefox sending telemetry to the US? I’m neither American nor Chinese, and would consider both governments hostile. Which one of them has access to my data is merely a choice between plague and cholera.

So in the end it’s on informed users to block transmission of telemetry themselves, regardless of their browser of choice.