I don't like the way Microsoft has lately begun treating both their devs and customers, but nevertheless they are a corporation - they have to someway make a profit - a business survives by adapting to their users and telemetry ("spyware") is data; data on which they (should) adapt to their user needs.
I have tried using it for the past couple of weeks, and had to fiddle a lot for the first week or so to get it working nicely.
The package state is stuck at 14.04 but you can upgrade[0] to 16.04 with dirty[1] trick.
After the initial setup, Windows Bash worked just fine for my Rust / Go / Python needs.
What would you mainly use the bash environment for ?
I doubt that; they most likely were just a bunch of nerds who recognised the cheap routers and discovered the vulnerabilities from just playing around with a laptop and something like Kali Linux.