I feel like you need to be extremely paranoid about hardware to really avoid compromise

modern chips have their own black box operating systems running and we don't really know what's in there and can't inspect it, right. it's "necessary" for these super complex chips to function, they say

you can physically remove the known wireless functionality from a board, but if the chip has a hidden wireless module on the die, they could have an antenna disguised as a trace and still use that to opportunistically contact known networks as you pass through them. shitty signal quality I'm sure but they don't need to extract data in bulk, they just need to send up a signal flare, so to speak. "come look at this guy"

keep the device in a faraday cage, and never bring another device in? that seems relatively safe

or just revert to 80s tier computing, which is honestly enough for many things