I’m pretty sure it only uses the intermediary to establish a P2P connection over WebRTC.

The OS experience is good, but I want to get away from RHEL/CentOS and clones due to Red Hat’s decisions in recent years

Rocky, but I’ll probably give Debian a try next time I decide to nuke my install

Yeah, you "log in" to the fake email, which causes an error and allows you to create a local account.