I worry about that more than I should. But yeah, that is the central hub that everything goes thru. I actually don't even want it to ping Asus's update servers because I can't be sure what kind of data is being sent.
I moved to Merlin firmware and hoping that doesn't have any telemetry. Unfortunately OpenWRT doesn't support wifi 6/6E routers and even the rare ones it does support, aren't really the greatest.
I want the asus hardware, just not their shitty software.