There is an interview with the founder on one of the Privacy podcasts. You can form your opinion.
My opinion - yes, they are trustworthy and you can do with them anything that you can with any Linux box, alternatively flash a clean OpenWRT for extra paranoia
I don’t see on the provided screenshot any apps that shouldn’t have the mic access.
You can certainly deny it and break some apps functionality but you’ll be “safe from ads”
The article is clipped. Is there a non-paywalled version