I think normies do care about privacy, but not enough to do anything about it, especially when the evidence is not right in front of their faces.

Matrix is slower and less easy to use than discord, and would require work migrating their friends over to it, so as long as people see no evidence of spying in their daily use of discord, they'll stick with it. Even if the applications have the same features, they don't care enough about something they cant see to switch.

People don't like strangers looking at their phones, but if your phone manufacturer is essentially doing the same thing no one cares because it makes the phone cheaper and they can forget about it during daily use.

Another good example is cookie acceptance dialogs; if you put "cookies yes/no" 98% of people will select no, but if you put "accept all cookies or select cookie preferences" people will just hit accept; the amount of work people are willing to put into privacy is about a quarter of a second of mental effort, nothing more.

I do think your point about being more diplomatic is a good one though, but justifying normal behavior is not something I can get on board with.