> What exactly are your threat models that this is causing a problem for you?

I would like my computer to not connect to anyone or anything when it's powered on if I'm not running interactive apps that I specifically wish to use the network.

It's sort of like the bad old days with linux distros coming with like 47 listening services enabled by default. It took a while before they realized that defaulting things to "off" was the best move.

I encourage you to look at the pcaps coming out of a fresh macOS install with everything turned off: App Store, iCloud, analytics, FaceTime, iMessage. You'd be surprised how much it's doing when it's sitting there "doing nothing".