Hey Alex. It's neat to hear your path to discovery of this. I was getting cert error popping up at some point as well. I believe it was related to Adobe Acrobat. I don't recall what I did to resolve it, but I'll share if I can figure it out.

My understanding is that Adobe packages and sells this telemetry data, which would explain some of the reluctance to help bypass it. I just don't use the cloud tools enough to justify the constant resource leech.