I can’t argue about the historic relevance; The article you linked is from 2020, the issues from early 2019. The original matrix developing company seems to have deep ties as described, yes.

But:

If you follow the very first link I. The article you can read the history of the matrix protocol itself. It shows where and when the matrix protocol was separated from this company and what the status quo seems to be:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)#History

From this it seems clear to me that the information from this article are by now obviously outdated with KDE and Mozilla two big mentioned community projects that are involved.

Wikipedia as primary source is not well suited, but the fact that the article linked to it themselves seem to show that they relied on the back then status quo.

In short: in 2017 they would be absolutely right, in 2020 there were still huge issues - but by now those are mostly addressed or are unknown.

Some might say interconnecting everything could be a legitimate goal. Nonetheless, some people started to report about huge amounts of data and metadata being sent to Matrix central servers.

Curious that this claim is without source in the original.

I also have porblems with their claims about bridges. Bridges are Band-Aids to allow you to communicate with people not on Matrix, not a dark masterplan to build a central spionage hub.

By default, a homeserver trusts matrix.org in questions of federation and identity of other servers. You have to get that trust from somewhere. You are free to choose another source for that.

(For example, my homeserver isn’t federated at all, and has that trusted server removed; it doesn’t communicate with anyone. Also it’s not synapse, but that’s besides the point.)