I blackholed Google analytics (and a lot of ad sites) many years ago when I noticed that it turned up in about every single site that I visited, including the Guild here. The fact that it tracks what's opened and what's the app that's receiving input is, in fact, very useful for their ability to write drivers that suck less. Observing that an application tends to start but never finish (or consistently gets a pattern "app start, driver start, OS crash message" or "switch to app, driver does stuff, OS crash message") is very helpful because it says that certain applications aren't dealing with certain features correctly and the driver can be rigged to use the last-known-good configuration for that setup when it happens.
It's generally true that most browsers can uniquely fingerprint a machine by observing what's installed (the constellation of fonts installed, for example, is pretty good as a fingerprint), so one vendor sending some data doesn't bother me all that much. And, certainly, a lot of folks do stupid things like use Chrome, visit Facebook, install as-supported game apps, and keep a Google account logged in, which results in a whole lot more personal stuff than the applications in use being sent to a lot less pleasant agencies than Google analytics.
The folks who care about privacy only use software that they (or the five guys who live in the cave with them) write themselves. Anything (or anyone) that interprets and displays HTML, that uses DNS, that uses device drivers, or has OS components whose code that you haven't personally examined and understood is always suspect. All of the Intel folks out there running MINIX in their processors as the OS for their TPM (or what weird Arm thing that AMD does) should be far more concerned about privacy for those reasons (bizarre code installed on your processor that handles encryption) than because a device driver vendor is sending relatively innocuous usage data to support their development efforts.