"can" is doing some heavy lifting there, especially based on my experience with VSCodium (which by definition is forced to work within Microsoft's opinion of build systems)

Anyway, uh-huh:

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/v7.5.1/.github... -> https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/v7.5.1/.github...

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/v7.5.1/.github... -> https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/v7.5.1/.github...

and, relevant to your comment even they opt out of telemetry https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/v7.5.1/.github...

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As a frame of reference, to build bash one only needs /bin/sh not a pre-built copy of bash itself https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/configure?h=...

I wonder if the distros that have it in their repositories already do this.

Mac's Homebrew doesn't. I just installed it, ran the "ls" command, and saw Little Snitch block outbound connections to Akamai and Azure.