Yes, it's a pretty big privacy concern, unfortunately Riot kinda already boiled that frog with Valorant. Not that Valorant was the first, but it was kinda the first one that people seemed to be okay with. Weirdly, Valorant only really got popular because CS:GO and Overwatch were getting stale, and neither Valve or Blizzard were doing much to keep their games fresh.

No, because their plans were explicitly for adding it in. Almost at the last moment too, as if the devs knew they were gonna get backlash for it.