incidentally gatekeeping new features being A/B tested is hardly fucking anyone over. Let's save the rage for things that matter.

no, it's quite reasonable actually:

Nimbus was originally designed to be an A/B test platform and so it made sense at the time that if telemetry was disabled that Nimbus should be disabled because there if you need to collect data in order to do quantitative experimentation. However, as Nimbus has grown into more of a feature delivery platform, it no longer makes sense to gate everything behind having telemetry or even studies enabled.