haha yes indeed if I had it to do over again, I would have just spent the extra few bucks on a non-affiliated device
Thank you for the information Davidfor! I actually bought my Forma in January of 2019 and it's been on wifi and receiving updates ever since. I do remember googling around for the affiliate.conf editing trick right when I got it, but it has never flipped back on during the entire time I've had it. So perhaps not as a direct result of the update, but as an immediate indirect result, since the logo did come back immediately after the update happened.
I found the LastAffiliateSyncTime line in "Kobo eReader.conf" file and edited it to the string you provided (with unix style line breaks!) - thanks for providing that string. Is there a resource somewhere to generate those, or a documentation of the format? (just out of curiosity)
Thanks!
-Josh