> on the other hand i got a mikrotik a while back and while setting it up it was silently phoning home

Yes, I think it connects to the mikrotik cloud automatically to setup a usable external DNS to your device, but I believe access to it is turned off by default unless you turn it on.

https://manual.mikrotik.com/docs/network-management/cloud/

https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/197984280/Ba...

The other reason is for updates, it can check periodically for firmware updates.

But outside of that it's not like streaming network telemetry or anything like that.