Super annoying behavior indeed.

But thanks to open source, being able to look at the driver and understanding how that SFP check is done, some people at the Serve The Home forum were able to figure out which EEPROM bit needs to be flipped for these cards to accept any and all SFP modules: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/patching-i...

I saw that and wrote an automated patcher as a quick python hack to automate that: https://gist.github.com/ixs/dbaac42730dea9bd124f26cbd439c58e

Another popular solution in an environment where you might have to support six different vendors' equipment, some of which is closed source (juniper, etc) and demands certain SFP+ EEPROM codes, from one pool of spare equipment, is to purchase the optics with blank eeproms and a coding box to write the vendor ID code onto them over i2c bus as needed. There's four or five transceiver companies I can think of now which provide the solution to do that.