I look at it a different way. Often one needs much more than just numbers to make an accurate count. You need actually to identify the inhabitants, so that they are not double-counted or missed.
This is a long tradition since 1850.
The information collected is very useful historically, especially for family history studies.
Here is the paradox: by asking overly invasive questions, a cry of “privacy right” will arise, and the data from these records may be ritualistically destroyed, so that researchers will have nothing at all to go by.
So let family historians send their own forms to their own families.
The government is NOT there to make their jobs easier, by invading the privacy of every single inhabitant of the nation.
It is also not a family historians business to know when my house was built, how many bathrooms it has, or how much I paid for sewerage, water, electricity, etc; nor my health insurance information; nor any of the rest of the prying they’re doing.