No, this is completely false. There was a proposal to add telemetry. There is nothing planned as of yet. In a community distro, we all get to speak. The discussion is ongoing. Those opposed to doing opt-out telemetry appear to be winning that conversation thus far.
Also, other distros do telemetry already. Debian is one of them.
I used Debian full-time eons ago, but last time I tried in 2019, it was a dog of a desktop OS to me compared to Fedora. It works fine as a server, but it's simply not a great desktop.
I don't know about that. IBM is traditionally stupid, yeah, but they wanted Red Hat for a reason. The CentOS debacle altogether was Red Hat, not IBM, and I don't think they are doing too much day to day operational mandates for stuff like this. I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing. I know it's easy to blame IBM, but I don't think it's that simple.
OpenSUSE is not a fork. It's the base.