His setting for Telemetry, as he himself acknowledged, are wrong. Another strange behavior is how there are connections to google.analytics, which makes no sense on a Windows 10 machine without any software running, as he pointed out. His testing setup seems weird, so I would take anything he posted with a grain of salt until new tests in a more controlled environment are made.
This does not surprise me in the lest... It may be an attempt to see how much negative feedback/resistance they get by breaking/disabling functionality of tools and partnering with 3rd parties for add sense traffic revenue. I installed Server 2016 Standard, and Data Center Edition in a VM recently, and there is 99% of the same bloatware/phone home crap that comes bundled with pro and enterprise versions of windows. No version of Win10/Server2016 is safe out of the box. I know that sounds super tinfoil hat cat guy, but sadly i think the only real way to block all of it, is by using a Firewall appliance like Cisco, Juniper, or a Pf-sense box.
I doubt it's intentional, but they might also be looking at complaints. It's clear they want this telemetry to be standard. A company this big tries to make the best of any situation. I would add that it's likely they intend on Windows to be an advertiser-driven platform at some point. Telemetry is a big part of that.
Simply hating on MS is not a solution. You can either stay on top of this stuff or eventually give up because you don't understand and end up using default settings. You won't hold out forever. It's better to keep yourself educated on the issues.
I tested the group policy settings myself. They didn't set the appropriate override registry keys. I suspected some of his testing was faulty, which is why I went the extra length to test it myself.
Not exactly, you can easily control and stopping telemetry. When someone pretends to call themselves ¨IT security analyst¨ and just installs glasswire and conclude that build 15063 has a problem? Group Policy does not offer a complete solution, example Allow Cotrana=0 does not exclude completely outbound Cortana network traffic. For the complete exclude Cortana network traffic you have to add some extra Windows Search reg value.