The very next text in the article after what you quoted (following the image) is:
> I consider this a customer-hostile practice. I should not have to connect a piece of hardware to the Internet, even once, to use all of its features. If I hadn’t connected the Pixel 7 Pro to the Internet, then “OEM unlocking” would have stayed greyed out, thus I would not have been able to unlock the bootloader, thus I would not have been able to install GrapheneOS
The author then describes connecting the phone to a networking sandbox and monitoring its traffic, all the way through where they were eventually able to unlock it after giving it internet access.
> If I hadn’t connected the Pixel 7 Pro to the Internet, then “OEM unlocking” would have stayed greyed out, thus I would not have been able to unlock the bootloader, thus I would not have been able to install GrapheneOS.
