How it is currently designed is the more performant solution.
Having thousands (hopefully millions soon) of websites each downloading an entire database of vulnerable components and their versions, loading that database into memory on each site, then doing a check … that is a lot of redundant resource overhead (e.g.. will cause performance issues, wasting memory and resources on the website’s servers). This is why we collect just the current running versions of software and do the check on the remote side. This is one of the reasons our plugin’s resource usage is the lowest of all major WP security plugins.
I understand you have concerns about the collection of data, but Patchstack is being honest that your site needs to tell us what software name and versions they are running so we can efficiently cross reference our database of known vulnerabilities.
By doing so we can help people prevent avoidable hacks on their WordPress websites. Our goal is to make WordPress sites more secure in the first place.