Right now Nintendo bans everyone for everything.
Once you started sxos youre fucked when you go online.
Do a nand Backup BEFORE starting anything, then you can maybe avoid a ban in the future.
Again, stay offline or Nintendo will ban you.
It might help if you clarify what you're saying a little if you're going to give advice and to stay away from blanket statements. What matters is that we don't know exactly how Nintendo decides you're going to be banned, and the data collected so far doesn't point to anything concrete. The only way to be 100% sure you won't be banned is to not modify the software in any way.
As you pointed out, the safest possible option if you want to modify software until we know more is to backup your NAND and restore it if you plan to go online.
The hyperbole doesn't help anyone looking for answers, and starting SXOS isn't a definitive ban, despite what some people have reported.
What
IS clear is that if you launch SXOS and connect to the internet regularly while within SXOS (just as an example) you shouldn't be surprised if you're banned someday and that goes for every other modified software being run with an active internet connection.
There's nothing specifically that points to spooky offline logs being used other than speculation based mostly on "feeling that I didn't do anything
wrong". What I've seen from tweets, developers, etc. is mostly summarized as "hey we don't know if Nintendo has other logs they didn't point out explicitly in Horizon, so if you get banned by using our stuff it could be because we didn't know they were being created! Welcome to the early days of a console being hacked, and the ascension from incompetence that Nintendo has shown since the 3DS and Wii U!". I find this totally understandable because we simply don't know for sure, and they would feel bad if they didn't mention it and their creations (totally unrelated to piracy) led to bans.
Now that I've finally gotten that last paragraph off my chest,
for fuck's sake can someone point me to a source where everything I just said is wrong? If not, can we as a community stop spreading so much FUD?