That’s a good point on how the OS could be “causing” it. I don’t think my take was very likely after I thought about it for a while.

From the pico side of things it does require an account but you can disable any telemetry in the settings. I have looked at my network traffic with it both on and off and they do seem to be true to their word. I wouldn’t trust their apps or App Store necessarily, I just use Pico Connect to connect to my windows PC (or ALVR on Linux) and everything is steam or local from that point on. I’m pretty sure I made the account with a fake name and email and it let me.

Maybe has something to do with making assumptions about how the nand controller is going to allocate things across superpages but that is a stupid random guess and also I have no idea why it’s an OS issue but boy do they keep finding ways