Hello Tom and Happy New Year.
That reference has been added to allow collection of publishing information. As per the component documentation:
"Log deployment of component, including in which type of environment it was done in (development and production). You can disable this by setting the site property AllowTelemetry to false.
This information will be handled internally in order to support decisions in further product developments."
If you are changing the component you can remove it, it won't change any of the chatbot features.
Bruno Martinho