Perhaps some... other or better way of authenticating to the printer? Previously there was just a single, essentially fixed, numeric string that gave complete access to the printer, and communication was via TLS with a self-signed cert.

I don't want to hypothesize about what it could be doing, I want to see what it's actually doing (or see some actual info from folks about what they've seen) so I can decide if I'm comfortable with that or not.

The bambu cloud service has a very low value-add and they are trying to make it mandatory. the speculation is that they are trying to add a subscription model for print farms, which 3rd party slicers enable.

the printer itself?