I always use my kindles in fully offline, sideload-only. My current one hasn't left airplane mode since I got it in 2018.
Had a funny experience once with a fellow (who was in his third year of computer science at a reputable university), where we just so happened to get on to the topic of ebooks. I told him how I operate my little machine, which I'd only started using. He was shocked, and stated clearly that he thinks it's unethical towards authors to use a "jailbroken" device like that and not get books through the Amazon store...
Sigh.
Scale makes it seem pretty straightforward to me.