Apart from the reference, they seem to like humour, or at least saying it's "for the busy and impacient" while the name actually means "lasts forever" is funny.
> Is it normal for remote shells to have telemetry?
Well, tools that you wouldn't expect to phone home like text editors and compilers now do. See VSCode, the .NET Core compiler and even the Windows 10 calculator [0].
I personally found that to be a high quality joke. I mean, this isn't Reddit, but I wouldn't stick around a website too long if it were genuinely all business, zero fun.
While this was a joke, I am concerned about terminal utils having (opt-out) telemetry. It seems to have spread recently. For example, Homebrew, .NET core, ...