homelab

I guess it depends your version of safe :p

It won’t murder you if that’s what you’re asking. You can always monitor your egress traffic if you’re concerned. Ultimately, for home use it likely doesn’t matter.

Spying today takes the form of custom silicon branded as the original with extra transistors added before fabbing. Usually higher nm processes since they can’t fab on the latest nodes.

Knowing this, the chance of getting a counterfeit chip on a name brand switch is non-negligible as it is, and those parts come from China too.

The firmware might be a concern, but again, you need to be a valuable target.