Silent Install of Network Manager breaks my Raspberry Pi

I purposely do not use Network Manager on my Raspberry Pi system, however Arduino connector silently installed it (along with its PPTP sub-package), apparently in an effort to retrieve network statistics.
(See commit ed8fbf2 on 16 Feb 2018.) However, since it promptly cut off my WiFi connection, it didn't get any network stats anyway.

A) This seems like an abuse of root access; it goes against the principle of least surprise, among others.
B) There seems to be no way short of editing the source and recompiling to prevent it from happening.
C) This behavior is undocumented (as far as I can see). #

Hi @jkpeters37

the installation of NetworkManager is not just about the stats but to manage WiFi and Eth networks all together. You can read it here:

arduino-connector/handlers_stats.go

Line 35 in ed8fbf2

// WiFiEvent tries to connect to the specified wifi network

or here https://github.com/arduino/go-system-stats/blob/master/network/net.go#L54
Because we use that dependency to manage the network connection.

A) The source code is available so abuse is really a strong word imho, but I can agree it should be better documented
B) Indeed this will land in no way to manage network interfaces for us, all the other options like ifconfig or similar are too complex, lack an api and are really hard to port to different systems
C) See A), I completely agree on it, we are going to schedule a fix in the docs.